


Desperado

by fluorescentgrey



Series: Empire Building [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - America, Alternate Universe - Civil War, Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, Alternate Universe - Western, Angst, Bandits & Outlaws, Bounty Hunters, Drug Abuse, Drug Addiction, Drug Dealing, F/M, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Recreational Drug Use, Smuggling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-16
Updated: 2015-06-16
Packaged: 2018-04-04 16:12:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 14
Words: 75,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4144170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>West Texas, 1861. “I’m unsure when we elected to hand the reigns of this operation over to a hophead felon and a bottom-tier bounty hunter.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. I.

**Author's Note:**

> NB: There are plenty of mentions in this story of Southern slavery and also of racially-charged / racially-motivated conflicts like the Mexican-American War, Civil War, Indian Wars, etc. I have tried to keep everything as accurately historical as possible.  
> The drug abuse tag is really, really, really real and will be continually a major element. On account of this, there are some moments of what could be called "dubious consent" - you have to be sober to give consent! - so read chapters 5-8 with care if you need. The gore and violence is also really real - it's just a little more than canon-typical with canon being Harry Potter and contemporary Westerns.  
> Please hit me up if you have questions or concerns or if you want to call me out on something – I promise I will be receptive. Also, if you want a New Western History reading list, I can help you with that too! I'm [HERE](http://yeats-infection.tumblr.com/) on tumblr.  
> All character death is canonical. I'm already writing a sequel.  
> I could not have done this without - C, K, N, R, S - the Ravens to my Enoby.

I. 

Surprising Lily – Hashish – James’s Clothes – the Proposition – Breakfast – Lily Learns a Secret – The Decision – Memory – Jailed in Del Rio – the Drunk – the Scar – the Boys – Card Games – Jailbreak – Withdrawal – the Opium Den – the Road to Brackett – a Deal – a Night on the Desert – Departure – Another Night, Another Departure – Two Years in the Territories – Genoa – Whiskeys with James and Lily – Dumbledore and Riddle

 

Genoa, Nevada Territory  
April 1861

 

Remus, having climbed up the drainpipe outside, was sitting naked in the dark in Lily’s room for about an hour with his hat over his lap before she came in with a lantern from downstairs. To her credit she did not drop it and her face did not betray even a hint of surprise. Instead she shut the door quickly and set the lantern on the nightstand beside her unmade bed. The soft yellow light it cast the room in revealed the silky piles of lingerie on the floor and the fact that Remus had tracked sand in. “Thought you didn’t like fucking,” she said, toeing out of her shoes, taking the ribbons out of her hair.

“I don’t,” said Remus, “I was just in town.” He noticed the brown glass chemist’s bottle on her vanity then and the cold feeling tightened by a single increment, like a belt. To think it had been there in the dark with him for the whole time. “I thought you might have clothes.”

“What happened to yours?”

“I don’t remember.”

“I can lend you a dress,” said Lily.

Maybe he would have taken it, at another time, depending on the color. “I was thinking more like – you must have something of James’s.”

Lily had come closer to fetch her nightgown which was the silken thing on the chair behind Remus’s back. She pulled it from behind him and the carven wood was cold against his spine. Her mouth maybe tightened a bit at the sound of James’s name so she deflected. She was surveying him decidedly clinically, for a prostitute. “What happened to you generally?”

“I also don’t remember, Lily – ”

“How do you not remember clearly getting beaten to shit,” she said. She was undressing now also deeply without eroticism which probably meant she trusted Remus, which was itself disconcerting.

“I don’t know. I woke up in the desert.” It had been about a days’ walk East from Genoa. Around him there were no footprints. At first the quantity of blood had been startling but it was mostly from a shallow wound on his head. When he first tried to stand his knees gave out and he puked mostly acid. Beside him was a canteen half-full of warm water and his hat. According to the date as delivered by a scared-looking shepherd kid at a stream he crossed he had been out three days and last remembered drinking mezcal in Tonopah with a handful of very blurred faces… “Everything hurts. I think I fell off a cliff.”

“Everything looks like it hurts,” she said, “Did you overdose?”

“I don’t know.”

She was in her nightgown now with her wild hair tumbling. He was kind of seeing where James was coming from. She sat cross-legged on her bed and drew a ball of cannabis resin wrapped in a cotton cloth from the dresser drawer where she also kept her little silver pistol. “You want some of that laudanum on the desk?” She was good and she’d seen him looking at it.

“Are you sure?” Remus asked, for absolutely no reason. _Yes_ , the thing was saying. _Yes Yes Yes Yes._

“Ain’t mine.” He didn’t know if she was lying. “You can just take that glass of water.” There was one on her bedside with a couple suspicious lipstick prints around the rim in varying rusty shades. Still Remus got up, holding his hat over his crotch, and droppered a bit in from the brown glass bottle. There was just the smell of it – God, it was bitter, kind of floral. It smelled like he could breathe again. The cold belt tightened and then it loosened. Lily was either watching him or staring at his bare ass. He sat next to her on the bed and listened to the sounds of men fighting in the street while she scraped a bit off the ball with her fingernail and he sipped at the water. Under the taste of the laudanum the water itself tasted like oil or semen or ash. The thing, like, the little hungry animal, it was kind of saying: _not enough, Remus, not enough_. Still it was an improvement over the incessant howling.

Lily passed the sticky resin ball over. “He wanted to talk to you, by the by.”

“James?” Remus took a fingernail-full of resin and passed the ball back to Lily. He knew she would not pass it again; Lily was infamously ungenerous with her drugs.

“Yeah. He did leave some clothes here, come to think of it.” She gestured vaguely into the closet. He finished the water half-gagging and went on over. It seemed to take him forever because everything was starting to feel really good. “He wants to talk to you,” Lily said again.

“About what?” James’s clothes in the closet were of all things his favorite pair of ripped-up, too-short jeans and his oversize white nightshirt with the needle-thin tear on the chest. Still Remus put the hat back on his head and put them on, balancing with one palm against the wall. “Stop staring at my dick.”

“Why the fuck would I stare at your fucking dick, Moony.” She was clearly stoned. “James wants to talk to you about Greyback.” Remus rolled his eyes, almost on purpose; it was the first physical reaction he could muster that felt appropriate in a domestic setting, even if that domestic setting was a whore’s bedchamber. “In fact he wants to talk to you about Greyback so badly he made a pretty serious Offer with a capital O.”

“I thought he was after, I don’t know, bigger fish.”

“He thinks knowing about Greyback might lead him to whoever, you know, his White Whale.”

“That Riddle guy.”

“Yeah,” said Lily, “whoever. Anyway he said he would get you a full pardon from the state of California with perhaps more benefits negotiable in exchange of course for information leading to the arrest and capture et cetera.” She met Remus’s eyes and started laughing. “Those clothes are ridiculous on you.”

Remus couldn’t think of a retort to either that or James’s proposal so he laughed for a few seconds weakly until he had to sit down. Things were splitting kind of nicely. He could feel the music from downstairs vibrating up through the floor. Lily must have realized he had mostly passed out. She was whistling something, or singing… it moved closer and then away with the smell of her hair, like cannabis and vanilla. The little hungry animal was saying, _almost enough, Remus_. It could sleep like this, though; Remus felt it treading in a circle and lying down. God, it was nice and he couldn’t help but start thinking about California.

\-- 

Lily smacked his shoulder a few times and then dropped a tin plate of lukewarm eggs in his lap. Outside the sun was already high and the heat seeping in through the wide window. “It’s nine,” said Lily, “and the doctor’s comin’, you better get outta here else they’ll skin you lookin for money.” Remus groaned and picked at the eggs. In the morning light through the window the runny yolk was a thick vivid yellow. Lily rummaged around in the closet a bit and came up with a green canvas knapsack. She put the chemist’s bottle in it, bless her, and Remus’s canteen, which she had filled, and a half dozen rolls wrapped in a soft dishcloth. Lily’s initials were embroidered in the cotton, Remus realized, feeling punched in the face or something. Shockingly, she tucked a very small paper-wrapped ball of cannabis resin in the front pocket, too. “You wanna help James,” she asked, handing him the backpack.

Remus had thought up half a plan whilst loaded that he thought he remembered approximately half of, which left him with a quarter of a plan, which seemed fairly reasonable given the circumstances. “Sure,” he said, “um, I can’t go to California. Can he meet me in Virginia City? Maybe in a week, like, on the thirtieth? April thirtieth? Train’ll get in around sunset.”

“It won’t be him,” she said, “this whole inquest into Greyback is very secret. He’s gonna send this guy Black.”

“Oh,” said Remus, “Sirius?” It had been a long time since they had seen each other. In fact the last time had been in Rocksprings, Texas, nearly six years ago, a couple days after they had all met. In all that time he had only seen James three or four times and Peter never, probably because Remus couldn’t go to California and Peter didn’t want to leave and James only did because of Lily.

“Yeah,” Lily said, “I didn’t know you knew him. He’s a queer fish. He works for James and Peter sometimes.”

“He was in jail with us,” Remus told her, tying his boots. Lily’s eyes expanded by palpable degrees and maybe changed colors. “Did you not know about that?”

“James Potter was in jail?”

“With me and Peter and Sirius. Down by the border in Texas. Just for like, twentyfour hours… that’s how we met. You didn’t know that?” Remus cursed his tongue but only mildly; James should’ve told her long ago. He wondered what James had told Lily regarding how he’d ended up friends with Remus or Sirius in the first place. James was a very good liar; one would have to be, to be a California state sheriff’s deputy who was also a former outlaw. Then again James was probably crooked as the day was long. That he kept a hooker in Genoa and continued to willfully consort with Remus seemed to make a point.

“No I didn’t fuckin know that Moony,” said Lily very loudly, “you daft motherfucker.”

“I thought you knew!”

“I didn’t!” She was looking over his shoulder out the window. “James said you and Pete and him were friends from school back in Atlanta.”

Remus laughed one short punchy bark like a coyote or a rabid dog. He had never gone to school a day nor had he ever been to Atlanta that he remembered. “Can you tell James to tell Sirius I can meet him in Virginia City on the thirtieth at sunset.”

“I’ll send a telegraph today, asshole,” said Lily. She was standing by the door with her legs stanced wide as if to bar it, chewing her thumbnail. “Take good fuckin care, Moony,” she said, and for a second he thought she was almost crying. She hugged him tightly and was breathing hard though perhaps she was just smelling James in the shirt. He kissed her cheek and shouldered the backpack and went to the window. It was quiet in the street probably because everyone was still hungover. The sun was bright and hot already and bleached the color out of the world from the hazy sky down against the mountains into the desert. Remus climbed down the drainpipe and looked up from the bottom; Lily had poked her head out and was looking down, red hair cascading in messy waves, a few strands stuck across her sweaty forehead.

 

Del Rio, Texas  
August 1855

 

The jail was very still and humid and almost quiet. When they led Remus by the dark cells he could feel the eyes. They tossed him in a cell at the end of the row with a single sleeping drunk who lay face-down on the packed dirt floor. Then they shut the barred door with a vivid metallic clang. The chain slid and rattled like a snake and a lock clicked in it. The guards rattled their keys but Remus wasn’t looking and didn’t care.  

There was a single window cut into the adobe and the light dying in it over the far square. On the wall just outside was a guttering lantern hung from a railroad spike. They had taken Remus's backpack which held his bottle of drops and canteen and gold and ammunition and of course they had taken his gun; it had been the first thing. They had left the tobacco and matches in his pocket and he sat on the floor beneath the window and set about rolling a cigarette. He was going to have to figure out how to get out before 1) the laudanum started calling for him and 2) he had to make that deal in Brackett at sunset in two days time. 

The drunk moaned and stirred and Remus saw it was a kid not far removed from his own age whose long, tangled hair was tracking blood from a head wound over his face. There was more blood crusted about his nose and there was blood in his mouth. Very recent events had desensitized Remus almost completely to the sight of blood but it was still jarring. Maybe it was just that this was someone also very young who he didn't know. People he knew he was used to seeing bloody and wouldn’t’ve recognized cleaned up. He went over very slowly with the cigarette in his mouth and his hands held out in front like you would to a wild dog. The whiskey smell was like a punch in the face but the kid was breathing in that slow and ponderous manner of the wasted. Close up Remus saw he wore US Army duds heartily disguised with a layer of mud and grime, torn and messy and with sleeves cuffed to the elbows against the summer heat. He was trying to grow out a mustache probably to make himself look older and it was truly, comically awful. For a second Remus rifled the pockets looking for laudanum but there was nothing and he probably would have smelled it first off had there been anyway. Carefully he turned the kid back over on his side in case he threw up. He had nice skin, Remus thought wanderingly, and a big spreading red mark on his arm, bloody knuckles… He thought already his head was starting to feel loosed up.

It was just then he heard the clamor in the hall and looked up in time for the guards to open the door and throw in two more boys, somehow also just about Remus's age, who met his eyes and promptly looked terrified. At that time he still was not quite accustomed to it. Later he would be; the Face with which he was customarily regarded was a weird hybrid of pity and fear, even when the scar had healed up. By the time he was seventeen it was a thin and jagged white line like punctuation. At fifteen there in the cell in Del Rio it had just been made and it was raw and open, oozing liquid, stitched up messily with coarse and bloody black thread, gone septic under his left eye and swelling up his cheek. He could feel the stretch and heat in it but had gotten over his fear it would kill him now it had quit bleeding and caused him only comparatively mild pain especially with the laudanum which, the tiny hungry thing reminded him, he had not had now going on three hours. The guards slammed the cell door behind the two boys who stood close to the pale yellow circle of light ogling Remus like he was personally responsible for having drained so much of the drunk's blood. In the echoing hallway he could hear the guards laughing. "Hi," he said. He thought the shorter one flinched, or the light did. "He's okay," Remus said, talking about the drunk. "He's wasted is all." 

“He’s bleeding a lot,” said the taller one. He was dark of skin with a riot of tightly curled hair and big brown doe’s eyes. God, they were both fucking fifteen. The little one was sunburnt and even the tall dark one was red in the nose.

“Does he need stitches?” said the little one.

“I bet you can do stitches,” the tall one said, then shut his mouth very quickly and looked horrified he had said anything at all. Remus cocked an eyebrow at him. In fact he had not sewn it up himself. J.A. had offered to do that and then Merle said he would burn it out with gunpowder. J.A. had protested and said it would turn Remus blind. He had tried to say something about preferring the stitches and Merle had had to help him open his mouth and put the drops on his tongue.

“It’s not all that a lot,” said Remus, “anyway I ain’t got a needle or thread or nothin.” 

“If you had a needle,” said the little one, visibly mustering his bravery, “you’d be shootin’ up with it.”

The tall one elbowed him fiercely in the pudgy side. “It don’t work like that,” said Remus. He was already very, very, very tired of talking and it seemed the tiny hungry animal had already started chewing on the end of his temper. “Go ahead and sit down.” He backed off from the drunk, who was snoring. “It just looks like a lotta blood cause it’s from his head.”

The boys sat very close against the back corner of the wall opposite from the window and Remus and the drunk, whose back was illuminated by a strand of soft white moonlight. Very suddenly and very quickly the tall boy said “I’m James and this is Peter.”

“Okay,” said Remus, “you can call me Moony.”

“What’d you do Moony,” said Peter.

“They thought I was gonna make a drug deal.”

“Were you?”

“No,” he said, “I have to on Friday.”

“What day is it?”

“Wednesday. August 22nd.” Remus took his pouch of tobacco out from his shirt pocket again. “Either of y’all want a cigarette.”

“I want one,” said the drunk from the floor. James and Peter jumped six feet in the air. Remus rolled one up quickly and passed it over and leaned to light it with his palm bracing himself against the floor slipping in the drunk’s blood and whatever else. “What happened to your pretty face,” slurred the drunk in the gold flicker of the matchlight.

“I cut it.”

“ _You_ cut it?” incredulous, from James.

“No,” Remus said measuredly, “It got cut.” To the drunk – “What did you do?”

“Drunk and disorderly.”

“Clearly,” said Peter. James just kept elbowing him so hard he would probably have a bruise if he didn’t already.

“Did you try and beat somebody up?”

“He kicked your ass.”

“I can see that,” said the drunk, “I can feel it.” He sat up in slow, deliberate increments. The moon was still on his back like a thin cotton mantle and the blood traced down over his forehead into his eyelash until he smudged it away with the back of his hand. James and Peter were watching against the far wall with similar expressions of fear and awe which rather mimicked the way they had looked at Remus. “I’m Sirius,” the drunk said. The name on the breast of his army jacket was Black which was a word Remus knew and he wondered if it was Sirius’s real last name or if he had stolen the whole outfit, which seemed more likely.

“Moony.”

“James.”

“Peter.”

“What did y’all do,” said Remus, leaning back against the wall under the window.

“Robbed a stagecoach,” said Peter.

Sirius laughed one short punchy bark like a coyote or a rabid dog.

“Attempted,” James corrected tiredly, “attempted to rob a stagecoach, with some help, they were faster.”

“Y’all run off from home,” Remus said.

“Yessir,” said Sirius. Remus could have told that from six miles away and had meant to pose the question to James and Peter; James maybe nodded, or it was the light shifting in the hallway. “You too then Moony.”

“ _Si_ ,” he said, “couple years.” He had run off at eleven; it had been four years. He was frowning or something and the scar was pulling at it.

“Either of y’all got spirits of any kind,” said Sirius.

“You don’t need anything more to drink,” James countered.

“It’s for Moony’s oozing face.”

“Is it really.”

“Under your eye on the left side. Your other left.”

James passed a flask over and indeed Sirius took a swig, winking, then passed it to Remus. By the smell it was white dog bathtub whiskey. Remus daubed a bit onto the cleanish hem of his shirt and pressed it piece by piece along the scar. Each point it was burning separately and he felt the stitches and the thread slipping and each small thread inside the thread. It was burning at everything behind his eyes and perhaps always it would be like that. It was completely silent in the cell and he could feel them all staring at him. Outside in the street someone screamed.

\-- 

Remus did not sleep on account of the rapidly increasing gnawing sensation of the withdrawal but he laid awake watching the moon move in the window and listening to Sirius and James and Peter snoring. At dawn the jailer at the desk changed and someone brought a tin carafe of warm, oily well-water and a plate of moldy tortillas and black beans. James woke at the sound and elbowed Peter; Sirius groaned dramatically, evidently hungover. They ate in relative silence and passed the carafe around; it was gone too quickly. Remus could hardly stomach even a few bites of tortilla so he divvied his portion up among the rest. James said, “You feel well, Moony?”

He had been picking apart a black bean with one fingernail and inspecting the soft dehydrated grey innards. The smell of the spices was half delicious and half deeply nauseating. “What?”

“I said do you feel well.”

Sirius was looking at him from the corner where he had laid with his knees drawn to his chest in attempt to diffuse the hangover. It seemed he alone understood the gravity of the problem at hand. “Just – mind’s elsewhere.”

“Where is it?” This from Peter.

“How to get the fuck out of here obviously.”

“You jailbroke before?”

“Not quite.” He had run off from his father’s and from the compound on the desert and though it had been challenging there were no locks. There were just men with guns somewhere who could hardly see him running zigzags in the dark. “They change the guards just past sundown and again at dawn. And all in the night just one man at the door. More in the day, see, like, all the rats about.”

“What do you propose we do,” said James. He was mopping up the last of the black beans with a scrap of tortilla.

“If we can just get the door open we’re golden. We just have to think up how to do that.”

They brainstormed much of the day in between games of cards played with a pack missing an ace of spades that Sirius produced from one of the many pockets of his filthy army jacket. They passed James’s flask, which still contained enough for a sip each of bathtub whiskey. Remus hugged his knees and willed himself calm and still with every fiber of his being and every drop of opiate left within but his nose started running past noon. Still he won a few hands of poker; they played with bits of adobe chipped from the wall.

“Where’d you two run off from,” said Sirius whilst shuffling the deck. He was winning handily and presided over a small pile of adobe chips stacked like tiny cairns.

“Atlanta,” said James, “getting awful rough to be black in Atlanta these days. Even the manumission don’t mean nothing on account of they can just rip it up and sell you right back in.”

“Didn’t know they let anybody free down South,” Remus said.

“Yeah well,” said James. “Getting rarer and rarer.” Clearly he didn’t want to talk about it and Remus didn’t blame him. “Got a notion to come on out here bout a year back. Mentioned it to Pete; he said he was in too.”

“Rough business at home,” Peter said, chewing his thumbnail.

“Sure,” said Sirius, “me as well.” Remus thought he could have seen that ten miles off too; Sirius had a kicked look, like no one had ever told him they cared or bothered showing it. In Peter it manifested as a sort of skittishness; he seemed spooked by loud noises. “What about you Moony.”

God, the question: Moony, are you out here in Texan jail because your family beat you one way or another? “My mom’s dead,” he said, “my dad drank… I was bored. Nothin to do, nothin to eat… I didn’t feel any kind of obligation to him or that place.” Maybe in the sickness of it all the valves inside him just got turned on. “I just walked out the door in the night. Don’t think my dad hardly noticed.” None of them knew what to say to that. Remus said “James I couldn’t imagine – havin to fear that at every turn.”

“Rough livin,” Sirius concurred. He dealt their cards out; Remus’s were alright. He won the hand with a queen high straight though Peter gave him a right run for his money. James applauded riotously when he reached a shaky hand out to draw all the adobe chips in.

 --

For a while they debated ideas in whispered terms and settled on the simplest plan. Turned out it was resoundingly undifficult to break out of a desert prairie jail of that caliber. They waited until just after the changing of the door guard past sunset. Remus was sweating with the withdrawal, nose and eyes streaming fiercely, and he just laid down prone in the square of moonlight, fighting his gut still. Peter rattled the empty tin carafe against the bars and hollered for help. “He ain’t breathin,” Remus heard him say to the guard. There was a jangling of keys, then there was a thump and a whump and the guy was out on the floor, Sirius and James having elbowed him hard in the back of the skull. They slipped out the door one by one. A cursory investigation revealed their effects must have all been stored elsewhere because they were nowhere to be found. They were all of them too skittish to stick around much longer for a more thorough search so they all bolted out into the wild hot desert night. The wind had been coming hard out of the South for many days now and it whipped the sand up violently and into it they all ran, Peter to the rear, Sirius to the front. Out to the East of town where they slowed to a brisk walk everything started feeling very cold and Remus’s teeth were wildly chattering. Something was chewing at him from the inside out starting with his gut and he bent double trying to move it somewhere else but it wouldn’t go. Blood or bile or something rushed up and into the cut on his face as though someone had put gunpowder all through it and set it alight. Then someone’s palm was in the center of his back for a second and Remus could tell by the boots it was James’s. “Alright?”

Remus kind of laughed or dry-heaved. Sirius said “Clearly he ain’t.”

“What’s wrong with him?” This obviously from Peter. Remus chanced a look up; they were all gathered round with the moon casting shadows on their faces, drawing frowns deeper. Judging by the silence Sirius was giving Peter a cold look and Remus chanced a further look to see it which he instantly regretted; the vertigo spun the sky off. He turned and puked acid mostly into the dust and a little onto James’ left boot. His mouth made a word like Sorry but his voice wouldn’t go in it. Sirius was saying something very sternly and James was scuffing his boot in the dust. They were nice boots and under the dust they were clean. Something else turned in his stomach and he shut his eyes.

Sirius was talking in his ear. “Come on, kid.” They were walking together, somehow. How the fuck? The crease of his elbow was against the back of Sirius’s neck. The moon was tight above and behind them and there was a weird warmth from it that he could feel itching. Somewhere ahead or behind or in the past or in the future James and Peter were talking quietly with one another. “Listen Moony,” said Sirius in his ear. “Tell me straight, are you trying to quit.”

Are you trying to quit!

Remus nearly laughed or puked again. He shook his head no, which made him dizzy. He was trying to just put one foot beforeish the other but Sirius walked very fast and smelled like blood. The entire world was vibrating and dragging off the sides of itself and he knew if he opened his eyes there would be nothing left in space except the road to town and Sirius dragging him along it and somewhere behind him in the void James and Peter splitting a single cigarette. There was vomit at their feet and the road was rolling up like a carpet.

Perspective shifted. Someone was pounding perhaps on the door to hell itself. The heat washed over him and he was nearly sure of it then. Sirius was talking again sternly and then he was passing the weight of Remus over. The air was so thick with the smoke of it perhaps he moaned or something. Then they were sitting and Sirius said “Here we go Moony.” Someone lifted a cup to his mouth; the ceramic was smooth and warm. Like bone, he thought for a second, or like just-dead flesh. He drank it quickly. He felt a drop trace down his neck then nothing.

\-- 

The light slid though the small high window between his eyelids and into his brain. Remus stretched a foot along the threadbare carpet and kicked over the empty teacup at his feet; the rolling sound of it woke Sirius, who was passed out on the floor. “Hey, Moony,” he said, “You look better.”

A very cold dread feeling had made a tight squeezing fist around most of Remus’s internal organs. “You didn’t, um – ” He gestured generally around the room. In the bright dawn light through the window there were a few others on scattered pillows who were still dead out. There was a tiny woodstove in one corner with a stained teapot on top; to its left were a few dried poppy stalks and a glass jar of seeds, to its right a stack of white ceramic teacups. Against the wall there were a few pipes racked up like pool cues and in the other corner there was a safe. Sitting above it was the keeper of the place, who was also passed out, precariously leaning a stool against the wall. A few candles had burned down to wax puddles frozen spreading over the floorboards. In the shifting morning light the whole affair seemed very quotidian.

“I didn’t,” Sirius told him, “I don’t like this stuff.”

“Okay,” Remus said, “good.” He had bent to grab his teacup which had rolled under his sagging armchair. Caught under the inside ridge were a few drops of cold amber liquid he chased with a finger and licked up. Inside him the little thing was still asleep and because of it everything felt as though it could be catalogued. “I have to be in Brackett in twelve hours with four grand I don’t got,” Remus said. He also did not have any drops nor any money with which to buy more which was possibly even more pressing. He remembered suddenly that in his backpack was everything he owned in the world except the clothes he was wearing. Which constituted – four grand in gold (his complete savings from four years in hell), tin canteen, half a chemist’s bottle of probably-stolen laudanum, with eyedropper. _Don’t fucking cry_ , his brain said.

“I have four grand,” said Sirius. “Unrelatedly there’s a chemist in Brackett I know.”

“Christ,” Remus said, like a laugh.

“I know we just met and all. I don’t want you to die or nothin and I have the money.”

“Can’t ask you to buy me drugs,” Remus said though the thing inside him was going _yes yes yes yes yes you can._

“I paid your way in here last night, didn’t I? Plus it’s pain relievin’ for your face.”

“What the fuck were you doin in that jail if you got money.”

“It ain’t mine necessarily.”

“You wanna rob a fuckin bank or somethin?”

“No,” said Sirius, “It’s my parents’. They outta Comstock. Longhorn ranchin, you see. On the border.” He cocked an eyebrow at Remus as if to say, that ain’t all. It was a liquid look with seemingly boundless implications. “There’s a big old bank in Brackett and the teller’ll recognize me.”

He was very pleased with his genius idea and was doing up his boots. Remus watched him. Sometime in the night he had cleaned up and found different clothes. He’d put his hair up in a knot on top of his head but it was falling out, dark, in loose messy curls. Across the bridge of his long nose was a splatter of very pale freckles. The cut on his forehead had quit bleeding but the bruise around it was spreading vividly in a riot of color. The neck of his shirt was open a little and he had about four chest hairs. Remus wanted to say, I sense the implicit. I sense it is implicit that your parents are smugglers and thus I sense it is implicit that your parents finance or otherwise directly aid the person who did this to my face. The person who – “Sirius,” Remus said, to stop thinking, “I know this fuckin deal cause I seen it done. We’re gonna get halfway out and you’re gonna shoot me in the back.”

“What would be the fuckin good of that.”

“I don’t know, like, you could do the deal yourself.”

“I don’t know none of the fuckin logistics not to mention I’d have no damn idea what to do with all them drugs.” Sirius stood up. With Remus in the sagging chair he looked very tall though they were near on the same height when standing. “Put your damn boots on. James and Peter are in by the by and they’ll be waiting outside of town hopefully with ideas.”

“They’re fuckin idiots though.”

Sirius laughed his coyote yip laugh. “They ain’t,” he said, “they just don’t get this whole thing the way we do.” One of the shapes on the floor stirred and rolled. Remus put his boots on and got up, cracking the knots out of his back. Outside he rolled two cigarettes, one for himself and one for Sirius. They were both squinting in the morning light and Remus felt it pulling at his scar. “Could stand to buy a little hasheesh from ya,” Sirius said.

Remus kinda laughed. “That all you want? For the four grand?”

They walked together along the stream to the edge of town where James and Peter were waiting, half-awake and yawning, by the ashes of a small campfire. “Lookin better Moony,” said James.

Peter had somehow finagled them all a ride with a supply train East thirty miles to Brackett. Things went smoothish. Sirius produced his deck of cards and they played twentyone in the back of a wagon with the cards sliding. Remus hardly remembered it but probably Sirius won. Between hands he told them the story about his accidentally having joined the army to peals of riotous laughter. In the early afternoon Remus and James and Peter waited around back of the big bank in Brackett while Sirius, having fixed his hair and straightened his clothes, went inside and made a massive withdrawal of funds he then appropriated between the lot of them. They split up and Remus walked South a mile or so along the main road and sat in the dust in the fading sun feeling maybe like he could sleep. Just before dark a man came up on horseback. He passed a canvas pack down and Remus passed the gold up. Nothing further was exchanged. He walked back to town alone in the soft moonlight. The feeling had begun chewing and on the last hundred yards he was biting his lip hard enough to draw blood out of it.

In the saloon Sirius and James and Peter were sitting at a table in the back corner drunk and laughing. They cheered when they saw him and were all three pounding on the table in their excitement but it was so loud in the saloon no one else seemed to notice. Remus thought possibly no one had been so overjoyed to see him in his life. Sirius poured him an extremely liberal glass of whiskey and passed him something under the table. The glass was cold where it touched his leg through a threadbare patch in his jeans. He eyedroppered a bit into the whiskey and put the rest in the backpack nestled amongst the mismatched cotton bags. “How about that hash Moony,” said Sirius.

They all went out back and scraped bits off the ball of fragrant resin with their fingernails. Sirius had the bottle and Remus was still nursing the whiskey cocktail. “When,” said James wastedly, “are we gonna hang out again.”

Peter nodded his agreement and Sirius laughed his coyote yip laugh. Remus just said, hmmm.

“Where’re y’all goin?”

“California,” said James. “There’s gold.” Remus did not have the heart to tell him likely there was not, anymore. Perhaps by the time he got there they would have found more somewhere else.

“You, Moony?”

“Northwards,” he said. “Don’t care where.”

“Me as well.”

After a while sitting they all wandered off together stumbling drunkenly into the night. Just before dawn Remus woke up on the desert, still fucking loaded and dearly having to piss, draped in his ragged coat and moonlight and the shadow off the mountains, when Sirius, in his sleep, elbowed him in the mouth. When the light had spread fully over the world they sat up slowly one by one. Remus took a few drops and Sirius scraped a bit more hash off the ball, worrying it out from under his fingernail with his front teeth and watching at the movement of nothing on the far horizon. All together they walked to the edge of town where Peter shook their hands and James hugged them both in turn very tightly, smelling like sweat and campfire. For some reason it was difficult to part ways. “Listen,” Remus said, trying to go desperately and not really wanting to go, “anyone – if anyone offers you a job down here don’t take it.”

James and Peter took the road out West into New Mexico and Sirius walked North with Remus to Rocksprings. In the night a thunderstorm moved violently across the plain and they took shelter under a sharp red stone overhang where Remus found shards of patterned glossy pottery in one corner. The place had a haunted feel, perhaps just because of the rain and because he was coming down off a dose and everything felt like it had something behind it. He took a few drops and Sirius took a fingernail of resin and they sat and played cards though Sirius won handily because Remus kept drifting off. The rain was a soft hum like a lullaby or like the sea and it traced patterns through the sand around their feet. He remembered somehow vividly riding a few years back through the end of the Colorado delta, the water spreading wide silt fans against the gulf. Eventually the storm passed and the animal sounds gathered from the desert. “How long you been out here, Moony,” said Sirius late. They had put the fire out and Remus was listening to the silence.

“Four years.”

“You were eleven.”

First Remus nodded then he realized Sirius wasn’t watching in the darkness and he said “Yeah.”

“How long you been,” Sirius started, then he stopped. Remus turned on his back; there was a rock under his shoulder or another potsherd, perhaps portentous. Sirius had covered most of his face in his army coat against the night chill. In the moonlight his eyes were very soft.

“Nearly all that time I guess.”

“You ever tried to quit?”

“No.” First he had thought about it, maybe when this gets better. Since then he had not thought about it. “I couldn’t for a while yet. With my face.” In the air he traced a line above it and Sirius watched him. Something broke, like a vault. “Knew I weren’t supposed to go out on my own but I did. Mostly out of spite I do admit. Thence for my trouble.”

Sirius’s eyes were moving from just above the collar of the army coat. Eventually he said “Goddamn.”

“I like the desert,” Remus said, before he could stop himself. “I always did. I feel like – ” he was unable to summon the rest of it. Instead he drummed his fingers against his collarbone and then swept a hand to vaguely indicate it, the long vacant flat, the dust blowing, the two opposing dimensions of earth and sky. Black on black, in the darkness, with the moon mediating. The clouds sweeping away somewhere far across the plain of it limned as they were and glowing silver and stretching in the distant wind. Inside the earth itself was another blackness, Remus thought, a hot and stretching viscous blackness compounding itself and hollowing inside the world. Cutting and cutting and cutting away at the solid substance of it.

Sirius was quiet for a minute. Far away coyotes were talking to each other across the plain. Something like a snake slipped nearby, displacing sand. A cloud dipped against the moon. Sirius said finally, “Sublime, the desert.”

“What?”

“It’s between pleasure and fear. Do you know that feeling?”

Remus had to think about it for a moment. By the time he said “I don’t know” Sirius had fallen asleep.

In the morning they walked North to Rocksprings where Remus unloaded a fair amount of the drugs on some old contacts. He bought a skittish red horse with the proceeds and Sirius spent a bit more of his parents’ money on another, a big and docile gray mare. They had a whiskey together in the bar with the horses tied up outside and went out together as the sun was falling brutally into the West with the spreading red a bloody riot. Sirius said “Heard tell I could get ranch work up North by Fort Belknap.” He was squinting against the sun even with his hand shading his eyes and the golden light and blunt shadows that cast him made the whole tableau seem like a painting, like some big myth given shape and color.

Remus wanted to say, if you wanted we could give this a shot together for a while. Many things stopped him and instead he said, “Likely you can.”

“When you settle down – well whenever you can find someone to take a letter down for you. I’d like it if you wrote to me.”

Inside his heart, or it was the sunset, there was a soft and spreading warmth that felt like drinking mezcal. It’d been a while since he’d had any kind of friend at all. The kids growing up around his father’s plot had all been quiet, not very smart, nursing frustrated urges for violence; those he’d met since then had indulged that urge and others and were actively working to indulge the rest. There was a constant kind of pecking order to it and if anybody truly cared they did so because they believed they would get their just desserts for it. It was to be expected but was not kindness. Remus often worried he had forgotten kindness. He said “Sure thing.” Sirius’s mouth quirked. “I’d tell you write to me but I’m not sure where I’ll be once I get rid of these.” He put his hand out to shake but Sirius hugged him. Over his shoulder Remus watched the darkness come spreading from the East against the sky like mixed watercolors. The pale sliver of moon in it like a chewed yellow fingernail. The light and the warmth spread like butter melting on his back or it was Sirius’s pressing hand.

They parted ways there and Remus rode Northwest to Midland and Odessa where he unloaded the rest of the drugs. Two weeks later he had ridden across the Llano Estacado to make a bigger deal in Van Horn, then he rode North to Santa Fe and then to Denver. He rode across the mountains and through Utah Territory where he had to buy more laudanum in Salt Lake City. Ordering it from the chemist was the first he had spoken in weeks. He rode Southwest to Cedar City where he lived on and off for a year or so. While there he paid for an hour of a whore’s time to take down a letter to Sirius in Fort Belknap but he received no response. The following winter spawned the incident in Imperial County that led to his exile seemingly permanently from the state of California.

Following that in the summer of 1857 he was in Genoa in the Western Utah Territory, running drugs over the California border. He was in the saloon one night nursing a whiskey laced with drops when he was nearly knocked off his barstool and onto his ass by a drunken embrace from James, who was himself trailed by a clearly frustrated young redhead in vivid silks, who shook Remus’s hand and said her name was Lily.

They sat the three of them together at a table in the back. “Goddamn if your face looks better, Moony,” said James. He kept reaching across the table to ruffle Remus’s hair. Lily was watching them interact with a bemused expression that suggested she was very stoned. James explained he and Peter had made it to California but there had been no gold left, obviously. Instead they had gotten jobs working as deputies for the sheriff of Yuba County and had eventually begun working mostly under the state sheriff whose name was Dumbledore. James clearly idolized the man and Lily kept trying to surreptitiously roll her eyes; clearly she had heard the spiel before. Remus remembered the name distantly from the few WANTED posters he’d seen with his own face on them; Dumbledore’s was the florid signature in the bottom left corner. James alleged Dumbledore was the finest lawman in all the West – invested in justice and a crack shot to boot. Famously he had killed the outlaw Grindelwald in the Shootout at Godric’s Corral back in 1851. He had fought in the Mexican War and had been a signatory upon the Guadalupe-Hidalgo treaty; he had been present at the cession of the territory which was now under his jurisdiction. According to James Dumbledore kept regular correspondence with Frederick Douglass and William Seward among others and he had even been invited to Washington for tea with Lincoln himself but had had to turn down the invitation on account of his sheriffing responsibilities. Remus had no idea who Douglass or Seward were and had heard only some talk about Lincoln and he was about to ask James for clarification when:

“You shot my coworker!” James erupted suddenly as if remembering out of nowhere, but he sounded quite happy about it. He punched the table in punctuation and Lily’s whiskey sloshed everywhere. “You shot Snape. Bully for you, Moony, goddamn.” He was bookending nearly every sentence with _Moony, goddamn_.

“Hardly can recollect any of that,” Remus said. “A shame I guess. Sounds like it was a crack up. Surprised I got a shot off at all given I weren’t sure which way was up.” Lily put her soft white hand gently on his forearm and blinked a few times owlishly. He didn’t know how to say he wasn’t interested; she was very beautiful in an abstract way, like a sunset, and her hand on his arm was rather nice. With a smear of makeup she had covered the pimples along her jaw but Remus saw the raised reddening spots and it endeared him to her immensely. She was just a smart kid perhaps in a few inches over her head but she was running with it swimmingly much as he had. “Anyway the moral of the story is I hardly meant to shoot your coworker, James.”

“Don’t be sorry,” James said, “He’s a right son of a bitch.”

James explained Dumbledore was after many small-time dealers and smugglers with a strict no-tolerance policy on account of the fact there were Rumblings. “Someone, American,” James whispered loudly, “across the Mexican border masterminding _million_ dollar deals.” Lily’s eyebrows were halfway up her forehead at the sound of that much money. “They say even with the Chinese,” he said, cocking his head at Remus’s whiskey. By now he was probably real good and could smell the bitter bite in it.

“Never knew anybody on that level,” Remus said, because of course that was where James was going. “We were within Texas predominantly. A couple deals across the border but we had a few disparate contacts and all of them Mexican. It was just after the war so everything was very tenuous and we always had to tread rather lightly.”

“Who’s we?” This from Lily, who was also good. James looked at her with something resembling awe.

“Used to run with this gang. Your boss, James, he likely knows the head honcho. Greyback was the surname.”

“Sure,” said James, “He talks about Greyback and his lost boys.” Lily’s hand tightened viselike and her thumb pressed one of Remus’s veins close enough against the bone he could feel his own heartbeat, or possibly hers. He nodded once, feeling like a windup toy. “Oh shit,” James said. “Is that – your face.”

“Yessir.” Remus almost said, also. The thing was almost asleep enough for him to say, also. Also, the long bloody seething cut they rubbed morphine powder into. Every night until it closed up. The smell of it dissolved in creosote – also, also. Also…

“Moony, goddamn,” said James. “Goddamn.”

“Right as rain now.”

“Miracle we made it to seventeen,” James said. “You too, Lily.” She had taken her hand from Remus’s arm and was sipping at her whiskey again. The other hand she glided hypnotically over James’ shoulders. Against his back her bracelets clattered. Back and forth and back and forth. James and Lily’s eyes met for a second; it was strange to be sitting at a table in a very loud bar across from that look, like a promise look. They talked a while longer as the saloon emptied out. Finally Lily took James’s hand and they stood. Remus saw she probably wanted to get whatever over with though likely it would hardly last very long. She clasped Remus’s hand tightly and tiptoed to kiss his cheek and James embraced him. They went creakingly up the stairs and Remus went out front, picked a bit off his ball of cannabis, wandered down in the still-warm night to the bunkhouse where he was living, passed out on top of the rough sheets, his backpack under his head, clinking, as a pillow.


	2. II.

II.

Fort Belknap – Buck Grinnell – Bleeding Kansas – Isaiah Lecompton – James and Peter in Sacramento – Attempt at Doctoring – Hospital and Dumbledore – Contracted – 1861 – Riddle’s Legend – Sirius at Twenty-One – Civil War – Greyback’s Handbill – James’s Plan – Telegrams – Reunited with Moony – Mezcal – Review of History – The Decision

 

Sirius rode North and worked as a ranchhand outside Fort Belknap three seasons until the operation was raided by Comanche and bankrupted. Most of his coworkers joined up with the Texas Rangers to ride into Indian Territory but Sirius packed up what he owned and rode still Northerly thinking he would work where he could and try his hand prospecting on something or other for the hell of it. The freedom was intoxicating as was the sense he had betrayed his parents actively and was widening the divide by the day, in distance and demeanor. If they had known he had spent his first week on the lam in jail with one of Greyback’s boys, his pack full of drugs, and two would-be teenage outlaws, one of them a freedman… they would have laced him near to death likely for sullying the family name but it was exhilarating to think about from a removed perspective. Early in 1857 he was en route to British Columbia when gold was discovered in Fraser Canyon. Northwards in Nebraska Territory a cougar spooked his horse who bucked and threw him and ran. In the nearest town he paid a doctor to set his leg and wrist and a hostler for a new pony with money he didn’t have. In the post office trying to get a letter off to an old ranchhanding friend asking for a loan he saw a WANTED poster with a six thousand dollar bounty.

Buck Grinnell was the man’s name and it seemed he had thieved horses and other property across Kansas Territory. He was last seen around the mineral springs in a town called Saratoga. Sirius took the poster down, folded it up in his pack, and rode Southeast. His leg was still paining him and every jostle of the horse was a fresh torture. In Saratoga he limped his way to the bar and peeled his eyes. The guy came in just past midnight and Sirius played cards with him a while, picked his brain. “I’m new to town,” he said. “Just thinkin about what there might be to do round here.”

They went on outside, drunk, and talked around the back, picking bits off the ball of resin Sirius produced from his backpack. After a bit the guy put his hand way up high inside Sirius’s thigh and Sirius pulled his gun, cocked it right up under the guy’s chin, tied his hands, and tethered their horses up for the ride down to Fort Leavenworth. The guy told the long yarn – “Way out West of here in the hills there’s a buried cache of gold…” Sirius yawned. The dawn was coming and his drunk was wearing off and his leg was paining him.

Things had gone very bad in Kansas in those days on account of its forthcoming admission to the Union and its slaveholding status. One old white guy had nearly beat another old white guy to death with a cane on the floor of the state senate not a year previous. Sirius dropped Grinnell off at the sheriff’s office and collected his bounty and rode out. Back in Nebraska he paid his debts and picked up another billfold poster, this one issued by the state of California for the arrest of a slave trader named Isaiah Lecompton, with the bounty set at ten thousand dollars. A year later, after he had found the guy, lost him in a fight in which he had been shot in the thigh, found him again, knocked him out, and dragged him by his ear into the Sacramento sheriff’s office, he looked up and beheld James and Peter with the receiving papers. Promptly following Lecompton’s incarceration Sirius was sitting in James’s tiny and very hot office relating the tale to Peter as James attempted valiantly to withdraw the bullet from Sirius’s thigh. He had given Sirius a whole bottle of rather nice whiskey and a bite of some confiscated hash “for the pain” and seemed to have gotten completely over his general squeamishness. Sirius watched a bead of sweat gather on the end of James’s smooth nose and wondered as per usual how the fuck any of this had happened to begin with. Fate seemed very real and sitting on the desk in that room. “Ran into Moony,” James said, attempting distraction.

Sirius was mildly surprised to hear Moony was even still living. “How’s he.”

“Still moony.”

“Unsurprising.”

“He still got that little poppy problem.”

“ _Little_ seems to be an understatement,” Sirius said. James had gotten the tweezers around the bullet and was grimacing in concentration as though he were the one in pain. Sirius realized dimly he was squeezing James’s shoulder in a vise, so tightly it must have hurt. He thought about Moony in a quick vivid flash, Moony passed out just in the sweetness not far from death, his red mouth soft, jaw hanging, the yellowing septic slice subdividing his face, a possibly dead white moth perched in his tangled hair. James had pulled the bullet out and held it aloft clenched in the tweezers with a bunch of fleshy grist and at least one of Sirius’s leg hairs. “Ta-da!” Peter grimaced sympathetically. Fresh blood welled up out of Sirius’s thigh, brilliant warm red, slipping around and dripping onto the floor like the juice of cherries. He passed out promptly.

 --

James was sitting on one side of Sirius’s hospital bed reading the newspaper and smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, and on the other side was a white-bearded old man Sirius had never seen before. “Hello, Mr. Black,” said the old man. James folded the paper in his lap softly. He had an intent look on his face Sirius had never seen. It bordered on Professional, which was somewhat disconcerting.

“This here’s my boss,” James said. “The state sheriff of California. Albus Dumbledore.”

Sirius had heard legends only – his shootout with Grindelwald, his exchange of gunfire with Mangas Coloradas, his correspondences with John Glanton –  and none seemed to fit with the face. “I’m looking for some people,” Dumbledore said evenly, “and you seem to have proven yourself quite skilled at that.”

Sirius just said “Yessir.” Nothing hurt, he was realizing. In fact it all felt pretty damn good. He sat up slowly and felt the wound on his leg pull but that was the worst of it. He realized what they must have given him in a few slow layers of mild shock and he thought of Moony again, who would have gutted them all likely if he knew.

“You come with Mr. Potter’s dearest recommendation,” said Dumbledore, and it took Sirius a minute to realize he was talking about James. “What I’m asking will be your same work with the same bounties to be paid upon retrieval just generally under my contract, though you’ll still be free to take others. My only stipulation Sirius is that I expect results.”

He had a funny way. He was kind but stern and it reflected even in his face. He would more than expect results, Sirius knew, he would be intent on results, he would demand results. He was demanding them even now from James and Peter. Sirius remembered with a bubble like a laugh in his chest – he had started doing this work as a layover on his way up to mine gold in Fraser Canyon. Likely it had dried up now and likely it would never pay out as good as ten thousand dollars a man. He doubted there was that much gold to be found inside the world.

He shook Dumbledore’s hand and James handed him a file full of handbills. Horse thieves, rapists, drug runners. Third to last was Moony. _Remus “MOONY” Lupin. Wanted by the state of California for smuggling, general mayhem, near-fatal wounding of a state sheriff’s deputy. Last seen: Imperial County, California, January 1857. Distinguishing characteristics: facial scar. Bounty: $1000._ James flashed him a look and Sirius carefully turned the page over.

“We have become very concerned about a person in particular, Mr. Black,” said Dumbledore. He fixed one crooked white finger upon the last handbill in the book. _Thomas M. Riddle. Wanted by the state of California for murder, smuggling, slave trading, general mayhem. Last seen: El Paso, Texas, July 1857._ The sketch was quite vague. It looked like something seen though a spyglass miles away – a blur that was hardly featured, a facial mask that was barely even quite human. _Bounty: $40,000._

Dumbledore left, tipping his hat at them both, and Sirius leafed through the handbills. In the illustration Moony looked hardly different – perhaps he was thinner in the face. The scar had healed up and was rendered as a soft grey line of smudgy charcoal. The artist had captured even his wild hair and his hungry look. Sirius said, “Goddamn.” He wanted to say something about Moony’s real name, which he had never known. _Remus Lupin_. He had probably been named after someone long ago in his family which was itself jarring to think. Moony was the kind of person who could have walked fully made out of the desert as a child and continued to grow independently from there, with no precedent nor antecedent.

“He was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” James said softly. “I attempted to explain as such to Dumbledore but he ain’t buying it. Course it don’t help Moony shot Snape cause he was damn near out his wits high.”

“He’d’ve killed you for giving me drops.”

“Don’t I know it.” James dropped the newspaper on the floor and set about rolling another cigarette. “He’s out in Utah Territory if you’re ever that way. Genoa by Lake Tahoe, per usual.”

“You visit him?” Something twinged like a sore muscle or jealousy.

“Got a girl out there, Lily. They get on. She likes her hash. You want a cigarette?”

They talked a while. James and Peter worked at the station and lived in a bunkhouse down the road. They had been no gold left in the Eastern mountains by the time they had arrived toward the tail end of 1855 and they nearly got caught up in a gang of bandits heading Northwards into the territories. At the last moment they had been deputized in a flurry of righteous action after a luckless prospector had kidnapped a few local children for ransom. When the kids were found and that died down they found the outlaws they had signed on with had already lit out for Oregon and they were still sheriff’s deputies. Life had unfolded as it tended to do from there. James was certain he was the first black deputy in California state history which was a dear point of pride. He was thinking of asking that girl Lily if she would marry him. He and Peter were trying to secure a pardon for Moony but as of yet they had come up with no ideas Dumbledore would swallow. He seemed happy, if not settled, and Sirius was glad for him. It was so far, though, from his own reality.

The leg got the better of him an hour or so later and James let him be. He tried to sleep in the soft sunlight streaming like water through the window catching the spinning of the dust.

 --

By 1861 the East was on the cusp of war with itself and Sirius had hauled in every outlaw in the original file of handbills Dumbledore had passed him in the hospital except for Moony, who according to James was still smuggling in small quantities around Utah Territory, and Tom Riddle, whose business in the interim had become the stuff of whispered legend, though Sirius expected the mythic construct exceeded the reality. He had recruited much of his outfit out of the old gangs of Texan and Sonoran scalphunters – deserters, mainly, or small-time smugglers, most of them missing fingers or with brands or noose scars from botched hangings and necklaces of ears or scalps braided by their hair into their uncured leather belts – and he called them Death Eaters. They all bore the same crude tattoo which was printed on their WANTED posters – rattlesnakes and a skull, woven together. They rode into the villages along the border and slew who they could and marched the rest to slaveholding lands for sale. With the proceeds and their relative influence they expanded the business Northwards into the free states. Rumor abounded about their purchase of politicians. The whole affair made James sweat for a variety of reasons namely his own blackness but also Dumbledore’s breathing down his back.

Sirius had come to wear a shriveled human heart around his neck. At twenty one he had learned the science of his business and made a healthy living. In the course of his work he had been shot thrice. He owned several guns, some engraved or filigreed with floral patterns or his own initials. He had ridden nearly every road in the West and he had prospected for gold on Pike’s Peak and accompanied wagon trains across the Oregon desert. He had watched a cloud of ash vomit from the earth from a skiff in the Puget Sound. Since the day of his departure from Comstock he had not spoken nor written to his parents and had heard nothing in return and was happy of it. Sometimes he imagined he had been swapped at infancy with another child and was no real spawn of the Blacks at all. Certainly there was no proof anywhere in his disposition that he had ever been parented a minute under their auspices.

Between his commissions and contracts he lived in a bunkhouse in Nevada City in the Sierra foothills. In April on the day of the declaration of war he rode down to the sheriff’s office in Sacramento for the first time in months. He aimed to speak to James about it, only to find that James did not want to speak about it. He saw Sirius and said, “This came in.” He passed the handbill across his desk with two fingers.

Sirius leant back in the chair until the front legs tipped slightly and studied the poster. It was a portrait of a wild man somewhere between wolf and human, a face contorted in an animal snarl. _Fenrir Greyback, ringleader of the Presidio Lost Boys, WANTED by the Texas Rangers for kidnapping, rape, murder, smuggling, and general mayhem. Known associate of Tom Riddle. Last seen: Valentine, Texas, March 1861. Bounty: $10,000._

“That’s Moony’s old gang,” said James before Sirius had even finished reading. “He’s the one cut up Moony’s face.” Of course that was not all, which they both understood.

It was the most profound evidence, Sirius thought, of pure horror. Before he had woken up in the cell in Del Rio looking up at Moony in the shadow in the darkness he had never considered there was true evil walking the earth’s same surface; he had only ever encountered his parents’ cruelty, which seemed a different breed. Now he was looking at horror near everyday. He looked back into the colorless paper eyes of the terrible face. It was like hearing a fairy tale, or someone else’s just barely descriptive rendition of their recurring nightmare. To James: “I sense you got a plan.”

James sighed heavily, pillowing his temple in his palm, elbow slipping in the piles of papers on his desk. “I can likely get Lily to find Moony within the next few weeks and then you and Moony can find this Greyback and then he can help us find Tom Riddle, no?”

“These people will not negotiate,” said Sirius, “that’s not in their goddamn vocabulary.” 

“He ain’t a Death Eater, it says right here.” Indeed, the symbol wasn’t printed, which was telling. “He’s a lone wolf which means he got his own agenda. Thus negotiation is – well, I’d say it’s even probable. Moony knows him and he’ll know how to get under his skin.”

“That’s probably the last place Moony’ll wanna be.”

“Don’t I know it but the thing is, I can get him a pardon for this. Dumbledore’s approved it, I got it in writing. Notarized, even. And you can take the bounty. Another ten k and you bet your ass the Texas Rangers are good for it if you bring them Greyback even with you being an adoptive Yankee and all.”

“You want me to grill him for you then hand him over to the Texas Rangers.”

“You’re better at this than me,” James said. He looked so harried and so much older than he was that Sirius probably would have done anything. “I’m an organizer, I’m a delegator, I do paperwork, I can’t set a fuckin foot in Texas for the foreseeable future unless I wanna end up on a goddamn plantation. I don’t care how you do it, I just need information, Sirius, can you get me that? A location, a town, a plan, names…”

The door swung in followed by the breeze and noise from the main precinct followed by Peter, who shut it aggressively with his left hip. He was holding two stained white mugs. “Morning Sirius,” he said, “I expect by now you’ve heard about the War. Also about the Plan.”

“Yessir,” Sirius said, “both in fact.”

Peter passed James’s mug over – black tea, with a bit of milk, fragrant with lavender. Peter drank black coffee himself; you could smell it bright and vivid in the still room. “How d’you like the sound of it?”

“Alright,” he said, “though I don’t know if Moony’s gonna buy it.”

“Likely he’ll buy it for the pardon,” Peter said.

“I ain’t at all convinced.”

“I’d take the chance to ruin the guy if I were him,” James said. “I’d take that over and above a pardon or a bounty or anything.”

“Think you’re a sight more rational than Moony though.”

“Neither of y’all seen him going on six years thus you ain’t no authority to speak on his predilections.” James sat and held the mug of tea close to his chest, long dark fingers fanned out over the mug, likely just for the warmth of it. “I know Lily can sweet talk him into at least wanting to meet you Sirius then you can talk him into the rest if he ain’t yet convinced.”

Peter was standing against the window and the light streamed in a white mantle over his back. James had his feet up on the desk, spreading papers and posters. Somewhere across the continent people were dying at Fort Sumter and down South even in California they were flying the bear flag and had been for months now. “They’ll start smuggling cotton out the back through Mexico and God only knows I ain’t gonna let them get away with it,” James said. “Gotta nip the whole endeavor in the bud before it gets that far.”

Sirius took the poster and folded it and put it in his back pocket. He and James composed a telegram to Lily and walked together down to the office to send it:

LILY DEAR STOP PLEASE FIND MOONY STOP URGENT BUSINESS STOP NEED INFO RE GREYBACK IN EXCHANGE FOR FULL PARDON STOP WILL SEND SIRIUS OUT TO NEGOTIATE IF HE AGREES STOP LOVE FROM JAMES END

 --

At the post office in Nevada City on April 26th Sirius got this telegram from James: PER LILY MOONY WILL MEET YOU AT SUNSET ON APRIL THIRTIETH AT THE TRAIN DEPOT IN VIRGINIA CITY NEVADA TERRITORY STOP I TOLD YOU SO STOP DO NOT DO NOT I REPEAT DO NOT FUCK THIS UP SIRIUS END

 --

Sirius came into Virgina City on the sunset train and Moony was waiting for him at the station, sitting on the curb at the edge of the square watching intently at the mechanics of the wheels. He looked about the same as Sirius remembered except the long bloody scar across his cheekbones over the bridge of his nose had faded into a thin and jagged white line, like a strip of chalk put there by a child. He was smoking absently one of his limp hand-rolled cigarettes with a length of burnt ash drooping from the end, and in the still air the smoke hung around him undispersing like a funeral shroud. Across the square the sun was dipping behind the mountains in the vivid pink display of some deathbird and the light it threw across the world was rose-golden, like through a stained glass window. To the East darkness gathered like a widow’s skirts. Moony’s hat was in his lap and his hair wild and the hungry look still writ large across his narrow face and he stood when he caught eyes with Sirius holding the hat against his chest with one spidery hand as though he were greeting a lady. The contents of his pack clinked when he lifted it and slung it over one slumped shoulder and he reached out his free hand to clasp with Sirius’s. He had nearly forgotten Moony was like a whole creature made of sweat and bones and perhaps a drop of someone else’s blood, assembled and animated deep in the desert by a coven of witches. Moony clapped his back and was smiling and the smile pulled his scar into another kind of smile. “Awful good to see you Moony,” said Sirius, “awful good to see your face not bleedin.”

Moony’s mouth opened and he tried to fit words in and when he finally spoke his voice was hoarser and softer than Sirius remembered it being. “Awful good to see you too Sirius.”

“Heard you set yourself up real good.”

“Thanks to you,” he said. “You know I stretched that six grand out real, real far.” They walked across the square toward the raised boardwalk and the saloon; there were a couple girls out front, bright skirts moving like flags in the dusk breeze. Moony had long strides but walked slowly for Sirius who still dragged his leg a bit. “What happened to your walk?”

“Got bucked then shot in the space of a year. Threw me for a loop and it ain’t quite come back around.” 

Moony’s brow tightened up. It was odd how the scar and the motion of it beneath his eyes functioned as seemingly another way to read what was going on inside his brain from the outside. “Who shot you?” He pushed the saloon door open with the flat of his shoulder and held it for Sirius. At the bar the girl, who cocked her chin at Moony like he was familiar, passed over wordlessly a bottle of some clear liquid and two fingerprinted, smudged glasses. They sat together to a table in the back corner, Moony with his eyes near unblinkingly on the door. “Hope you killed the guy.”

“Slaver,” Sirius said, “handed him over to our James as it turns out who had him hung.” Moony poured out the booze heartily into each glass; it was straight mezcal, the taste like licking ash from firewood. “Heard you got a bit of gunplay in the past few years.”

“Not quite a lover of it,” said Moony, but he drew his gun out from its tooled leather holster and put it on the table to show Sirius. “Acquired this baby in trade hence I had to tap over someone else’s goddamn initials.” It was a pretty silver Colt .44 six-shooter with a supple walnut grip, a sidearm made for the war. Someone had filigreed a girl’s name, _Margaret_ , along one side of the barrel woven with floral accents and on the other they had tapped their initials which Moony had smudged over with his own poorly rendered _RJL_. “This thing seen hardly any action. Thought it likely wise to eschew the previous weapon for whose use I’m wanted by the state of California.”

“Heard about that whole deal.”

“Yeah,” Moony said, holstering the piece again, “Really was quite the accident. Hardly can recollect even a fraction of the damn affair. And now Lily tells me James says he can make the whole thing go away.”

“He can, for a price.”

“Yeah, Lily said Greyback.”

“James figures he can lead us to his guy, that Riddle. He like to be smuggling around the Union blockade down there for the foreseeable future out the Confederacy’s back door and the Union’d do well to pull the root out before it grows.” Moony was running the pad of one long crooked finger around the rim of his glass in seeming contemplation. “James said you’d get a pardon from Dumbledore and I’m to take the bounty but I’d be happy to split the cash with you. Get you set on up in California.” Moony caught Sirius’s eyes for a second then he refreshed their mezcals. “I mean of course that’s if you want it. Seems awful nice out here.”

“It ain’t,” Moony said. “They found the silver lode near on two years ago, lotta rough types around since then. Awful lotta competition and an awful lotta scum. Sunsets are nice though.”

“Even more a reason to get that pardon. Settle the fuck down and grow cannabis on a big lot in the Sierras.”

Moony fixed him again and his eyes were soft and grey, one burst blood vessel tracing red inside, undercut by the white chalk line. “Ain’t no need for you to attempt talking me into this shit.”

“Why?”

“I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t wanna do this.”

“It’s just I wouldn’t wanna set a foot near that place again if I were you.”

“Color me shocked you’ve agreed to go back to Texas either given your history.” Moony was leaning across the table conspiratorially but still he watched at the door and at the shifting of the gloom. “The way I see it ain’t no one more qualified to do this than the two of us, am I wrong? Both Texan-ish, roundabout, know the terrain like the backs of our damn hands. James can’t go much further South of here without a fuckin cavalry watching his back and Peter loves his desk job too much to leave Sacramento unless under goddamn duress.” He leant back then and killed his mezcal and poured himself another and a dollop into Sirius’s, which he had hardly touched. “I’ve wanted to kill Greyback since I was twelve years old and James tells me you hunt bounties and you’ve hauled in nearly all the state’s wanted list aside from of course myself. For which I thank you.”

Sirius sat back and attempted again a sip of the mezcal. This time it was like his mouth was burnt out of it and it went down easier. Inside a warm feeling kind of spread or it was the feeling of Moony almost smiling from across the table. “Thought I was gonna have to do an awful lot more talkin.”

“No,” Moony said, “I’m sold. I been sold since Lily asked if I wanted to help James. Gonna be a rough enough few years for him on account of this mess.” He waved a hand Easterly as though anything like a gesture could encapsulate the whole affair.

“All that let alone Dumbledore breathin down his neck.”

“Ain’t fair considering how many damn deputies he’s got.” 

“Let me tell you he don’t think about fair,” Sirius said, “he ain’t got no real concept of fairness.”

“Funny considering that’s just about the only moral most of us have got.” He smiled when Sirius laughed. “Ain’t never met a single other person who laughs like that,” he said.

“Like how?”

“Like a rabid fuckin dog,” Moony said, “or like coyotes.”

Sirius poured himself another mezcal and Moony abstained, one wavering hand over his glass. “Bet you’re sure as hell glad you ain’t in Tennessee right about now.”

“Damn right and I bet you’re sure as hell glad you ain’t still within a hundred mile radius of your folks.”

“Suspect they’re already makin a killing on account of the whole thing. I don’t even like thinkin about it to be quite honest.” Rumor abounded in the right circles regarding his mother’s Confederate smuggling connections. The thought would have turned his stomach even if they had not been related. “Bet you don’t care to think about any of that either.”

“No,” said Moony. “Healthier I feel to mostly think about the future only.”

Sirius took the hint. “Suppose we can ride out soon as we get you a kit.”

“Got a kit and a pony,” Moony said. “Gotta secure a few affairs is all. We can ride out tomorrow at noon if you’d allow it.”

Perhaps, Sirius thought, he should be more suspicious of the affairs; for certain they included the chemist’s. It all seemed near on too good to be true considering he’d been sure Moony would put a fight up and in fact he was jittering off his damn barstool. “Listen Moony,” said Sirius, “tell me straight.” He had nearly forgotten the phrase was almost reprise but Moony remembered; his mouth opened, just. For a second they were fifteen again in the dusk in Del Rio. “Do you really, really, really wanna do this.”

Moony leant over the table and with two clammy fingers made a handcuff circle about Sirius’s left wrist. “I would do this,” he said, “for free, I would do it for nothing. I would do it without a pardon, I would do it without James askin me to.”

“Then how come you ain’t done it before.”

Moony smiled and let go and beat a jaunty snare fanfare out on the table with his fingers. “I didn’t have you before.”


	3. III.

III.

Theft – Riding Out – Relics of the Past – Crossing Into the Confederacy – Playing Cards – the Demon Star – Digging for Water – Abandonment Along the Trail – Montezuma Castle – Albuquerque – the Rio Grande – Remus’s Plan – the Cave – the Dream – Texas – Van Horn – the Smoke – the Sunset

 

Remus saw Sirius back to the bunkhouse where he was staying then slipped out alone into the night, feeling the mezcal and the evening breeze, keeping his head down in the street and sticking to the shadows away from the stumbling drunks. The affair he had told Sirius he had to put in order was in fact a theft of middling degree. In the wake of the declaration of war the Union had pulled its troops from Utah Territory and split the designation into two jurisdictions, one largely Mormon and one otherwise; Genoa and Virgina City were in the newly created Nevada Territory now, which he was still getting used to thinking. The abandonment of the military posts and general lack of religiosity in the Western segment had led to a sight increased lawlessness and a flurry of Indian raids. Thus upon wandering Virginia City while killing time waiting for Sirius he had seen a supply train likely out of Oregon Territory heading Southerly with supplies, including those of the medical variety, namely including powdered morphine. He had picked up a few glass vials at the chemist’s and then gone to await the train’s sunset arrival but now going back around the mercantile in the night he saw the supply wagon was still there, helmed by stamping gaunt donkeys whose crooked bitten ears swatted at flies. Remus crept around the back of them so as not to be sniffed out. There was no one on the wagon and the goods covered by tied-down dusty canvas he unhooked at a corner with shaking fingers trying hard to cast his hearing as wide as it would go. They should have been more careful with stuff like this, he thought as he found the barrel stamped with a red cross and rolled it toward himself, it could too easily fall into the wrong fucking hands. His were trembling and the little hungry animal inside him was chewing so intently he thought it would bust through his skin. This was the stuff he had gotten hooked on in the first place and thinking it, the memory of it, half turned his stomach and half filled him with this brutal, screaming desire… but they had had a thousand ways to do it there, he thought while he filled the two glass vials. They had powder they would rub into wounds, or they would dissolve it in creosote and eyedropper it in, and of course you could dissolve it in alcohol and take drops. Likely it had just felt so damn good then because he had never felt a thing like that before. He could not and never had been able to accurately describe the feeling of what it had done to his consciousness.

By the time he heard sounds moving outwards from inside he had already capped the two vials and stuck them in his pocket and was securing the canvas. Some of the stuff was stuck beneath his fingernails and it took everything in him to pick it out and let the wind take it as he crept back into the shadowed alleys. The hungry thing was screaming at him from inside and he felt it cramp up in his gut just out of spite. When he got back to the bunkhouse and took his drops he could almost hear it laughing inside his brain at how royally it was not enough.

 --

In the morning Remus rose early and met Sirius, who was already saddled up and licking his fingers of the biscuit he’d had for breakfast, in the square. They rode all day and night across the vast spreading flatness of that territory South toward the Colorado. The landscape was desert throughout but in some green nooks and crannies along the buried rivers Mormons had settled in compounds and their women would stand outside in the gardens in their pastel dresses, some holding shotguns, eyeing them as they passed, holding their children close. Down to the South the mesas grew taller and redder and were striated from the base of them in strips of vivid color, rounded on top by the sand-blowing wind and red, pockmarked and inhabited by wheeling black birds or bats who moved across the sky in patterns like loose black clouds. They camped at the base of the mesas beneath overhangs where the rock above had been stained with ash and Remus found carvings and markings in wagon grease made decades distant, or perhaps centuries; ancient mythologies and the renderings of birth. Animals and animal men with lightning weapons. He touched them and the rock surrounding feeling how deeply they were cut and how rounded and soft the edges then felt resoundingly guilty as if the makers were watching at him out of the past; perhaps they were. With dinner and with breakfast he had a few drops chased with water from his canteen and the world seemed to spin for a few minutes then settled, altogether colorful and more pleasing.

They rode far around the tiny Mormon fort at Las Vegas so as to avoid being stopped by the Union garrison stationed there and they rode along the Colorado where the river widened. They crossed, horses spluttering, at sunset into New Mexico Territory and into Confederate lands. They camped amidst a vast malpais of sharp grey stone bucking into the bloody Western sky and Remus took his drops and imagined himself present in the prehistoric scene of their making when the substance of the earth itself was liquid and malleable. He and Sirius played gin rummy by moonlight with his same deck of cards still missing the ace of spades and Remus wondered if time had passed at all and if so where? Time was still moving and perhaps it moved differently for everyone and everything. Perhaps somewhere for someone creation was not yet over and it was still unfolding or they were present in it now… Sirius won handily as usual because Remus couldn’t concentrate. The color was draining out from the world and the sharpness of it remained cast in deep white shadow by the high desert moon. Even the stars were multiplying above like they were being ripped in actively by the birds, in the legend, tearing the velvet blanket of it out of spite alone, to die –

“Alright?”

“Oh,” Remus said, “yes, yeah.” He concentrated very hard to focus and saw he had put a couple cards down in a skipping order. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay.” Sirius fleshed the run out with his own cards so it read in order, six to queen. “That’s better.”

He had long bony hands with crooked fingers, the middle bent toward the fourth. He bit his nails to keep them short and the whites were ragged and the skin about the beds degraded and bloody. The long red mark Remus had seen on his arm in the jail cell in Del Rio had healed up and was scaly like the white skin of a snake’s belly: a burn scar. Above it was a tattoo he had done himself, a long, spotty blue line that wrapped his forearm just below the elbow, nearly halfway around. He had given up attempting the horrific mustache and his facial hair grew sparsely; a few dark hairs curled against his neck, inside his shirt, which was open two buttons. He wore a leathery human heart on a black silk ribbon and you could see the valves of it. He had told Remus he had been shot thrice and he wondered where the scars were and what they looked like.

“Where’s your brain at,” said Sirius. He had a trepidatious smile on he was forcing a little bit.

“Up there,” Remus said, because the truth was embarrassing. He indicated the stars, the night, the screaming silence, the moon shifting, the craters in it visible like scars.

“Always liked the desert cause of this,” Sirius told him. “Cause of how quiet and you can hardly think for the quiet.”

It was hardly quiet and in his head it was like screaming.

“Did you see that star,” said Sirius, eyebrow cocked. He pointed but there were so many. “Southerly – by Perseus.”

“How d’you know about stars.”

“My family likes them,” he said. “Amateur astronomers they are. We all have star names or nearly all. Anyway that one – the red, d’you see it?” After a moment he did, bright in a corner. “That’s the demon star. The Chinese call it piled up corpses.”

“Portentous.”

“Yessir. The unluckiest in the sky. Sits always over this territory.”

It seemed the full sky was always over this territory regardless of the luck or unluck in it. They cleaned the cards up and tried to sleep but when Remus shut his eyes the star still burnt behind them.

\-- 

They rode across the vast landscape one behind the other into the stiff hot wind arising out of the South. The moon sat ghostly in the sky like a dirty fingernail through the day and brightened into being in the dusk with the sun’s refraction. Still they rode to the Southeast across the wide desert plateau, through the low greening juniper shrub that gathered and swept across the flat spaces between the buttes, arisen as they were out of the land like the devil’s hand had pushed them up from beneath. When they ran out of water they hobbled their horses in a dry arroyo by dusk and dug a deep hole in the wash with their hands until the sand turned cool and wet. Sirius pulled his shirt off and pressed the fabric into the hole until the clean water welled up through the weave. They dug three holes more before they had collected enough to fill their canteens and when they dressed again their clothes were cool and stiff with sand which dried in the sun and heat of the day and flaked away soft as talc. To the North the Colorado cut a deep and massive canyon Remus had never seen which Sirius described in dramatic detail with much gesticulation. He claimed to have pursued a bounty through the base of it astride a spitting donkey and followed himself by an Indian party hearing the war whoops of them echoing about the sandstone. “Red red red from the top miles and miles above me it seemed to the bottom and the water itself red like I was sure my blood would be, Moony,” he said.

They rode a stone’s throw West of the Union wagon road into Beale Springs to avoid being seen and they ate a midday meal in the cantina there in the first civilization they had seen now for days. Everyone looked askance at one another in that border territory and the back corner table was already taken so Sirius and Remus sat at the bar each with their hands not far from their pieces taking turns eyeing the door whenever the shadow there shifted. Sirius wolfed huevos rancheros chased with whiskey and several glasses of cloudy water and even Remus summoned appetite enough for a biscuit and gravy with a few strips of burnt bacon and a cup of black coffee spiked with a slosh of whiskey straight from Sirius’s glass. After they ate they rode out again Easterly through the valley cut by the Salt River keeping to the North to avoid crossing the Mexican border into the state of Sonora. They rode through rugged deserts and into the flowering of the Saguaro and the birds who dipped into the white trumpets of the floral crowns to drink as they crossed Northwards. A thunderstorm passed over visible far across the territory in the lowlands sweeping like a brush of grey watercolor dragged through the world and they could hear the sound of it from far away and see the cracks of lightning that illuminated the clouds and passed to the earth divisive like a message. They rode past the marks of fire and more than a few sunbleached bones of beast and man and the jetsam effects of foundered wagontrains with the rich fabrics fading and the smooth woods gnawed by animals and splintering. There were books which Sirius dismounted to read through and more than one of which he passed up to Remus to hold until he could get back up and secret them away in his own saddlebags. There was a red cedar chest there in that violent wild wilderness which when opened held a nest of tightly coiled rattlesnakes amidst the fine silks of some lady and a mothbitten wool Hudson Bay blanket which vibrated some chord of nostalgia deep inside Remus or he was just very high and remembering Tennessee and the single scant vision of his mother inside his head… Abandoned military posts and the creased corduroy wagonroads and the once-developed tracts of ranchers or prospectors with the adobe and sod of them falling still into the earth and their animals gone wild and milling in dust about the fallen fences and coiled rusting wire drinking the milky meltwater in the spring washes.

They stopped for water at a stone well in the shadow beneath a mesa with a herd of rangy black cattle who nipped at Remus’s hands and hair when he knelt to fill their canteens. Sirius was astride his pony and laughing. High in the stone above were set brick dwellings whose windows opened out like empty eyes across the desert. “Crazy to think people ever lived up there,” Sirius said.

It was around the noon hour of that day and the sun high and the scant shade like a cool bath. Remus looked up into the red and the blue of it and the yellow of the bricks with the sun thrown against them and the blackening of the water and the patina against the stone. He passed the canteens up to Sirius who held them while he mounted up. “D’you know who did?”

“Certainly not white people,” said Sirius. “It’s old old old old. Long ago. Indians might not even know if you could get near enough to ask them.”

They rode out. “That’s what I always liked about the desert,” Remus said, “The feeling that – this sounds crazy – the presence of it having watched so much and now watching me. And it makes you feel like a damn insect on account of it being so big and so old but it also feels like you must be important enough because it can see you.”

“Right,” Sirius said, “it feels like eyes. Feels sometimes like you’re gonna be in a gunfight any minute.” 

“Yeah but there ain’t nothin there. Just the rock and sand and that…” He felt the feeling of it at his back, the watching eyes in the windows or perhaps the cattle in the arroyo. They passed through the shade line into the sun itself a blazing eye without comparison.

\-- 

They rode through a forest that had become stone as though it had been set eye upon by giants and they rode again East toward the very tenuous Union post at Albuquerque. Once they hid in the shadow behind a mesa and laid down with their white-eyed horses in the cool shaded sand as a garrison in Confederate grey rode by straight-backed on nearly wild ponies with the final rider bearing the stars and bars of the rebel flag whipping in the wind with a snapping Remus could hear even across the desert. In the city Remus went to a chemist’s to refresh his drops and wandered the streets awhile alone. The morphine vials in his pocket were burning a goddamn hole and the drops seemed only to gloss it over like a thin layer of sheer ice. Beneath was a stiff current and somewhere a waterfall roaring. He ducked into an alleyway and took his drops and walked again through the streets as time seemed to jump to and fro across his memories and he recalled being a child, though he wouldn’t at that time have called himself one, laying trembling on an itchy pile of Greyback’s stinking furs as someone whose face in his memory was ragged and fading held above him a sheep’s stomach of morphine dissolved in creosote connected to a hollow glass tube whose sharp end was – but it was hardly worth even thinking about. Inside that memory was Greyback pulling Remus’s sweaty hair away from his face and quietly singing some old song like anything could more aptly soothe the pain of it than the drug, or possibly he had shuffled the whole thing up and none of it had ever happened. At the time it had seemed like the kindest thing and he couldn’t blame them hardly for having hurt him; it had seemed like induction. As a child he had longed to quell his loneliness far and away over anything else and it had taken him a long time to realize how hollow the breed of that belonging.

In an hour’s time he met Sirius in the saloon outside which they had tied up their horses and they rode down together to the wild spring melt of the Rio Grande and around to a secluded bend where they stripped and swam careful in the hard current. The horses drank and eyed the small fish and skittered on the bank baring their square brownish teeth. Remus was quicker than Sirius getting in and he saw as Sirius undressed one of the bullet wounds was in his thigh and one was just beneath his collarbone and the other must’ve been somewhere he couldn’t see. They were all three roundish and red and seemed like the pale circular catchmarks in some of the canyon windforms engineered by the layering and pressing of the sandstone. “You staring at my dick,” said Sirius, who was drunk, wading in on tiptoe.

“Staring at your bullethole,” said Remus, “It’s dangerously adjacent to your dick is all.”

Sirius grinned huge and white. “I’m a lucky man,” he said. He submerged up to his wicked eyes and tripped over something underwater. He let the current carry him a bit downstream toward Remus and sent a mighty splash his way that he hardly had the faculties to dodge. After a while they got out and dressed soaking wet against the heat and rode South again into the desert where they camped for the night in the high hills above the city on someone’s cattle tract and in the dusk the animals came over snuffling to watch at them while they played cards and the horses eyed them then slept standing.

\-- 

“Greyback and them’ll be in far West Texas or just across the Mexican border,” Remus explained in the morning. “They got this tent they can pack up and move like a travelling carnival or a preacher or whatnot. In fact I think they stole it from that kind of outfit.”

“How we gonna know it’s them and not some god-fearing folk.”

“You’ll know,” Remus said. “Don’t think you won’t. It’s like a hell version of whatever you’re imagining.” He stood, brushing dust off his clothes, to saddle up his horse to ride. “We basically gotta ride back and forth across that territory and we’ll see it eventually. Won’t be so hard given that desert’s so flat and void of feature generally.”

“I’m guessin we ain’t gonna be stormin on in there guns blazin.”

“Not if you’re interested in any kind of information beyond that damn ten k,” said Remus. “I got a plan though so never you fear.” It was the same quarter-plan he had hatched in Lily’s room in Genoa and fleshed out somewhat since then. It had reached a certain fever pitch with his acquisition of the morphine powder and now with a few good graces from whoever he was sure it would at least get him partway where he wanted to go.

“You gonna share a lick of it with me?” He could tell Sirius was hurt by it and was pretending not to be.

“Gonna try and set up some kinda fake deal. We gotta get him believing we got a product and need a distributor.”

“How you gonna do that?”

In his pocket – it was like carrying two golden rods around and never being able to look at them or touch them or spend them and to have them just be there waiting to be given to someone else. It almost hurt even thinking. He told Sirius, “I’m still thinking about it.”

“He gonna remember you?”

“Likely.” Of course he fucking would. “He’ll likely know you too on account of your family.”

Sirius looked stricken for possibly the first time in their acquaintance. It was as though he had just discovered a condition that had not been fully explained and Remus thought maybe he should’ve asked Sirius right back in the saloon in Virginia City, tell me straight, are you sure you wanna do this? “Goddamn,” he said. 

“He know how to twist every goddamn fear you ever had so take care you just – think about it like a dream or somethin. Like a dream with a hell of a lot at fuckin stake.” Certainly the whole affair was as such in his own memory. Sirius offered him a biscuit with jam but he had hardly an appetite. He took his drops and they rode out Southeasterly over the mountains and into the flat red desert, the world like a roulette wheel spinning in shards of color.

\-- 

The night following they camped uphill from the mouth of a massive black hole in the ground that inhaled and exhaled bats by the thousands and a wet dripping limestone smell. Remus sat awake very high with a cigarette watching at the bats against the moon and trying hard to listen for the sounds they made to each other. Very close they hunted for mosquitoes and cicadas. They moved in balletic hypnotic loops and seemed to fall until they caught themselves in the upward draft from inside the earth. Finally he passed out and awoke just before dawn from a dream when his mouth closed soundlessly around Sirius’s name. It had been years since he’d had any sort of dream of that variety about anyone and it had been years since he’d woken up hard on account of the drug. He got up trying his best to be silent and walked off briskly through the moonlit brush into the graying of the sky in the East and finally he knelt and undid his trousers and shut his eyes and chewed his lip to keep from making a sound. In the darkness inside his head he filtered through an array of blurred images. None would stick except the vision of Sirius from his dream walking before him through a field of red flowers who turned to face him with his mouth just open – after he came and fought his heartbeat back near where it belonged he found the sun had come up greening through the soft yellow hills of that territory and he had bitten through his lip.

Back at their little camp Sirius was half-awake and struggling to make coffee and drop biscuits over a poorly built fire and Remus could hardly look at him out of sheer embarrassment. He took his drops as they rode out and in the shade of the deep shale canyons he thought with a shock of terror perhaps something had already happened between them and such was his addlement he had thought it a dream. Or perhaps the substance of it was something else that had happened long ago and he was shuffling Sirius’s face into and if so what was that pure memory? His brain raced through it but it all seemed like a book of hardly-developed photographs that he had dropped and picked up in the wrong order.

At noon Sirius dismounted to fill their canteens in a running wash while Remus waited holding the horses’ reins just above amidst the browning scraggly juniper. The back of Sirius’s neck was sunburnt and his dark hair blew wildly in the stiff hot breeze from the South. His eyes were squinted tightly against the blowing sand and the sun. “You’re awful quiet,” he said when he passed Remus’s canteen up.

“Anxious dreams.”

“This place is sure as hell conducive. Like, the bottomless pit and all them bloodsuckin bats.”

Remus wanted to say something along the lines of, what is in fact conducive to my anxious dreams is your staunchly refusing to button your damn shirt all the fucking way. What is in fact conducive is your taking it upon yourself to take care of me when I have never asked for it. With all you expect you know about the genesis of my condition how do you believe that I can’t fucking handle a cloud of bats?

\-- 

They rode South into Texas through a highland whose mountains were sphinxlike in form and color, each rising spinally into a sheer face that seemed to have lost its human features with the ceaseless freezings and unfreezings of the winter. It was a silent world and they were largely silent in it except for when they called back and forth to each other in sight of water and their voices seemed very loud in the silence and very small in the vastness. Out here in the empty Comanche war parties could ride out at you almost without warning being as they knew the territory likely better than Sirius or Remus or any white man ever could and being as they had tricks up their collective sleeves that were beyond knowing, perhaps derived from superior intelligence. Their only defense was in the smallness of their party and their keeping to the shadows. Still the horses tracked dust. Remus kept thinking he could hear hooves riding down but it was only his heart in his ears.

At night they camped without a fire and hardly sleeping and the next day they rode down from the mountains into a small settlement called Van Horn whose only permanent structure was a massive adobe hotel. They had a whiskey in the bar sitting together in the back corner. Mistrust seemed a palpable sensation in the air like the smell of desert and old furniture; the bartender kept looking at them from beneath his heavy brow. Remus explained to Sirius that Valentine, reportedly the last place Greyback had been seen given the flyer, wasn’t forty miles to the South-Southeast. He was somewhere in this desert and these mountains and perhaps that was the very source of the mistrust in the air.

“You nervous?”

“Dearly.” Nervous was only part of it and the other part of it was the hungry animal howling with horrible excitement about what Remus knew he would have to do and that perhaps he would die of it. But how sweet death of that variety would be, he thought, with his whole brain, before he could stamp it down.

“Me as well,” said Sirius, killing his whiskey with a gulp. Remus didn’t want to say, you should be. Perhaps you should be more nervous even than me. “Shall we head out.”

They rode on into the desert flanked by the distant mountains shrouded in haze. It rained in those hills on occasion and the greenery was visible and tantalizing, mirage-like, even from so far. The road they took was trafficked mostly by smugglers and Indians and was not ten miles from the border with Mexico established in the Texan annexation. Under the sun’s eye and the moon’s paler in a corner of the sky there was no place to hide and only endless juniper to pick through in silence sweating with their eyes peeled in search of the pillar of smoke Remus knew would be rising from Greyback’s tent.

Just before sunset he heard Sirius go, a rare note of unsurety in his voice, “Moony.” He routed his horse about to look and saw the grimness set into Sirius’s face and his unshaking hand pointed into the East beyond the mountains and when he turned again he saw the dispersant grayness twisting out of the world like a coil of an old woman’s hair, or a volcanic stirring, or an exhalation from a pipe. It was smoke from the burning of maguey agave to make mezcal and it was smoke from fires that burnt flesh and it was smoke from opium grains mixed in with tobacco and it was smoke from the mouth of hell itself. Certainly someone had reached inside his belly and taken a hold of everything in a tight fist, or it was the hungry animal who, God, he had starved now for years since he had left in an effort to forget he had once been this – he spurred his horse in the side until she cantered and he heard Sirius follow. They rode fast into the green hills through the thin sand amidst the junipers and Remus knew they were kicking up a cloud of dust possibly visible miles to whoever was watching but it didn’t matter anymore. Death was ahead and behind and above and below and all around and complicit in the substance of this world and inside it they rode into the grey darkening of the sky with the sunset spilling blood down their backs.


	4. IV.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> just going to issue a general trigger warning for the content of this chapter.

IV.

the Tent – Inside – In Hell – Greyback – the Drink – Greyback’s Private Rooms – Moony’s Plan – Pure Morphine – Details from Greyback – a Letter of Introduction – the Dose – the Deaths – the Head – Escape – Comfort – the Ride to Van Horn – Telegrams – James En Route – Moony’s Idea – “What If There Is No After?”

 

When they rode up to Greyback’s encampment it was pitch dark over the desert with the black smoke spreading from the burning of mezcal. To the South Sirius caught eye of the demon star on the far horizon. Light spilled out from the tent, buttery, and the sound of laughter, and the smoke – agave, opium. They hobbled their horses in a copse of dead trees in a dry wash and when they both stood Moony near on grabbed Sirius by the collar. “Don’t take anything they give you,” he said. Something different was in his voice, sharp and cold like an edge of frosted glass. “And stay close to me.”

The road up to the tent was like to the gates of hell, strewn with bones and sun-blackened flesh. In the dim light Sirius saw the paintings on the fabric – the snakes and skull of the Death Eaters, a wolf’s head, a yonic red flower. The doorway was hung with skins of unknown origin draping inwards like curtains. Moony pushed them aside with one long white hand. Inside mayhem was general. In the center of the wide space in the bloody dust burned a wild bonfire stacked with dry wood and bones. On the walls were more skins, cryptic paintings, scrawled quotations in burnt black. Dogs yapped from a corner where they tore something to bloody shreds, stretching chains in violent unmusical cacophony. Some people sang and some screamed. Music, from somewhere. The air was so hot and wild and thick with the smell of it Sirius thought he saw Moony’s eyes roll back. They were passed out all around or getting there, nearly all of them men (boys, Sirius thought), most of them naked, bloody; the blood smell was second, and vomit, and shit, and smoke, and mezcal, dirty cloudy mezcal in clear glass bottles circulating. Some of them were dead, Sirius realized; there were flies buzzing, dipping in rotting wounds, blueing white bodies, motionless. Those alive watched from the firelit shadows, focusing their eyes with difficulty. Certainly some must have recognized Moony by his face or the wound bisecting it. A handful, sober enough or getting there, turned to him, passed on, inspected Sirius. In all of them, the hungry look, nearabouts sniffing at his pockets. Some were very young. Moony’s shoulders were tight and his fingers were twitching by his gun, perhaps with the drug in the air. 

By the fire were a few men in a few chairs and one of them had focused like a telescope or spyglass. It was the man from the flyer, Greyback. The illustration had done him no justice. His beard and hair were wild, like a thunderstorm in color, throughout braided with horsehair and mismatched human hair, stiff with blood, with food, with cannabis resin. He wore bloody judge’s robes affixed with military pins and patches, Indian sandals, gold in his ears and eyebrows, every piece a trophy. A muscle stiffened in Moony’s shoulder, and Greyback was smiling. Sirius’s heart threatened eviction from his body and his brain besides.

Moony sat in the chair across from Greyback and Sirius stood to his left, arms crossed at the wrists behind his back, feigning bodyguard. There were eyes about and circulating, soberish eyes, some with crude weapons and some with new and shiny armyissue guns, likely stolen. Moony looked very small in the chair which was massive and constructed architecturally, a looted heirloom, worn chartreuse velvet now draped with a stinking uncured cowhide, stained with the blood of animals, a human scalp thrown over one armrest. A chair, Sirius thought wildly, for sacrifices to sit in. Slit the throat or wrists and wait for God to take them like a dose.

“Remus,” said Greyback, his voice so hoarse with the drug it was like a rattlesnake rasping. “To what do I owe the honor of your presence.”

“Spare me,” Moony said brutally. Sirius had not known he could speak like that. “I wanna talk to you without all your dogs.”

“Lest you forget you were one of em, of late.”

“Past tense is key,” said Moony. “Pains me to admit but likely we can help each other. Just you and I, help each other.”

“Carson,” Greyback said to the pair of eyes on Sirius’s right, “go fetch Mr. Lupin and his consort a mezcal each with a couple drops.” His eyes settled back on Moony, stripping eyes, acidic. A look that might melt lesser men. “Who’s this, then.”

“This is my associate,” said Moony. “Perhaps he’s familiar.”

Greyback’s eyes sifted Sirius like dredged silt for gold. “You a Black, boy.”

“Yessir.”

“Heard they disowned their oldest.”

“They weren’t interested in competition,” Sirius said. “Not even from their kin, I suppose.”

The drink was pressed into his hand. It smelled like a hellmouth, like something rotten burning. By the bitterness in it it was spiked beyond a couple drops. Moony had shot his back in one gulp without even flinching and now he settled the cracked glass on the armrest of his chair, carefully, beside the scalp. His long body had gotten loose and his eyes very still. He said “Let’s come ahead around back just the three of us. What I got’s for your eyes alone.”

Greyback rose then Moony did, and Sirius followed. With Greyback’s back turned he threw the drink down into the sand by the fire and followed them with the empty cup. At the South side of the tent they pushed out through another flap of skins and one of the boys at the door joined in walking. They were all three scraps compared to Greyback’s violent hugeness in the judge’s robes. The night air had never smelled or tasted so good but it went rotten again when they went inside another makeshift structure, set up like an Indian teepee with poppy tea simmering over a fire that burnt agave and dried grass and chips of cattle shit. A few more boys were in there – younger, Sirius saw, his stomach turning – and Greyback shooed them out. He sat on a pile of furs by the fire and so did Moony; Sirius and the other boy stood by the door. The kid must’ve been around sixteen and he wore a belt from which dangled two shriveled human hands. From the corners of his eyes he watched the pendulum sway of the heart around Sirius’s neck, and at Sirius’s hands by his belt, by his gun.

“Heard you got a new contact in Mexico and I want in,” Moony said. Direct, as ever. Wind shook the tent. From outside a dog snarled and yipped. The music went on, fainter now, a violin, somewhere, out of tune.

“And.”

“It’s been six years and I know a lot of people now that you don’t.”

“And.”

Moony produced from his pocket a corked glass vial containing a soft and granular white powder like clean sand, or like salt. He held it between his thumb and forefinger and turned it over and back again, the powder moving as though it measured time inside an hourglass. Greyback looked at it then back up into Moony’s face. The silence – the violin – the wind – the dogs. Sirius’s own heart in his ears, or the drums – hell’s front ranks, manifest, pushing in the door, through the hanging skins.

“What’s this?”

“Pure morphine,” said Moony, “there’s more where it came from and there’ll only be more and more. With the war. They ship it to field hospitals in barrels size of winecasks.”

“You talking about the thieving of it?”

“The thieving’s taken care of now and indefinitely and it’s a distributor I’m in need of at this point. Thus you, thus your man.” Moony flipped the vial and flipped it again, watching the powder slide. The movement of it was hypnotic and Greyback was watching. The boy at the door was watching. Sirius was watching at it and at Moony’s face, which betrayed nothing.

“How about we try a little before we make any rash decisions.”

“I need details from you before I let you try a little.”

Greyback sat back. Something burst in the fire with a series of soft pops and the rising smoke blackened. “Alright, Remus,” he said, “You’re looking for a man called Riddle, in a town called Coyame. Just South of here through the desert into Chihuahua.”

“I’m not riding down there just to get scalped and eviscerated; you’re gonna introduce me.”

“I got enough to do up here without your fuckin demands.”

“Then write me a goddamn letter of introduction.”

The horrifying death-wish impossible genius of Moony’s cryptic Plan unfolded slowly. Greyback was writing in big messy script on a sheaf of bloody paper he’d pulled from somewhere and when finished he passed it to Sirius to double-check; he knew Moony couldn’t read. It was spelled horribly but legible. _Riddle – thense my asocyates Loopin (face scar) and Black (looks like a Black). Trust werthie gents with morfine deal. Yers, F. Greyback_. Sirius nodded once tersely in Moony’s direction and handed the letter back to Greyback, who melted a bit of red wax from a stubby candle to seal the scroll with the imprint of his signet ring. He handed it to Sirius, who stuck it in his belt. Then he said “Alright, Remus, what’ve you got.”

For the following ten minutes Sirius feared somehow he had gotten dosed and was hallucinating. Certainly the world had become nightmare. From the door he watched while Moony took his pocketknife out from its tooled leather holster beside his gun and very calmly slit the skin on the top of his arm, just past the delicate bone of his wrist, like he was sectioning fruit. Blood welled up in a fine red line like a bracelet then darkened and spread; Sirius could smell it. There was blood in the fire, on the matted furs, spreading like rosepetals against the faded blue fabric of Moony’s jeans. With the other hand he popped the cork from the vial and shook out a bit of powder and dusted it with a breath, just a thin layer like a frost, across the fresh wound. Then he passed the vial and the knife to Greyback. His free hand sealed the cut and Sirius watched his eyes slip, the long fine slope of his back hunching in a sculptural curve. Even the grip he had on his cut arm loosened and the blood welled up there pressing through his fingers. Greyback slit a long line across his palm and passed a heavier layer of powder over, then clenched his fist around it. His eyes rolled, he fell back to his elbows, convulsed from the hips, like a dying whale beached up. The kid from the door ran over and Sirius’s hand twitched for his gun but it was just to grab Moony’s knife from Greyback and dose himself with what remained in the vial.

Moony said, slurring, “Sirius…” Then he stood, bracing himself carefully against the floor and still nearly falling back into the fire, a dark shape against it spattering his own blood over himself and the furs and the floor, and very slowly with his unwounded hand he drew his pretty filigreed gun, held it shakily. With the hurt arm he lifted one of the moldy pillows from the floor, stumbling again, and cupped it around the barrel; a very poor man’s silencer, but who would hear? The two shots were even and softer than thundercracks, the echoed thump of a heartbeat, sounding like hell unzipping from below. Feathers burst in a pale wave with the force and the sound and fluttered to the floor where they stuck in blood like tar. Somehow each shot made its target and the absorbing flesh sound was more nightmarish still. Each body jerked in it. Sirius standing at the door watched a thread of pale, thick saliva tracing out the side of Greyback’s mouth, over his cheek, over his jaw. His eyes were clear and open and glassy. “Dead,” Moony said, vocalizing thought, though scarcely. “Sirius.”

The wind shook the tent and the smell of burning mezcal and a dog barking. Sirius was at Moony’s side just in time to catch him when his strength gave partway out; he was dead weight, bloody, limp, but he could stand, though shakily. The smell of blood and burnt gunpowder rolled off from him like petrichor. “What do we do about the body?”

“Head,” said Moony, trying very hard to focus. “I’ll do it.”

There was a conquistador’s sword in Greyback’s collection, formerly bejeweled around the hilt with some stones missing from their inlay; it was rusty, or the brownness to it was the blood of ancients, long since oxidized. Somewhere in Sirius’s mind it registered that the collection of bounties was his business and thus technically his responsibility but he couldn’t summon the will or ability to even move. He turned his back and heard two heavy thwacks, then Moony said, “All right.”

He was holding it by the filthy braided hair in the hand of his cut arm with his opposite hand clenched around the wound and he looked so like a harbinger of the world’s ending Sirius could not breathe. The eyes were open. The blood spread in a black puddle around the furs.

They went out with Sirius’s arm around Moony’s back, hand under one arm to hold him steady. The head was dripping blood and grist and the disturbed juice of its brains amongst their footsteps. The moon cleared itself from the spreading smoke and in the soft white bath of it Sirius could see Moony’s violent shaking and his own and he could feel Moony’s wild skittering heartbeat. He was thinking about Greyback and his hands, like purpling sausages in an overstretched encasement. He nearly puked, but then Moony did instead, mostly acid and mezcal, narrowly missing the head. In the tent they were still reveling in the violence of nothingness and Sirius wondered when it would stop, if it would ever stop. Likely it wouldn’t even stop when they realized Greyback was dead. They would just go on like they were until they too died.

Everything was haunted. It was in the screaming of the silence. They walked in the still night toward the horses. “The light,” said Moony, voice hardly past a whisper, “the moon, hurts…”

“What was that stuff?”

“Death.”

“Then how did you – ”

“I don’t know.” The ghostness was inside him and the vivid tired elsewhere, the spreading near-death of the drug. Together they stumbled over the strewn bones. A dog with three legs and each of its ribs violently visible limped up and limped away into the darkness.

In the stiff sand amidst the dead trees in the dry wash Moony’s strength gave out and he dropped the head with a sickening sound; the horses skittered in fear, snorting, shying from it. Moony knelt in the dust and Sirius, dizzy with the adrenaline and the relief and the terror hollering inside his head, pulled his tangled hair back from his face, remembering the dead moth in it, long ago, in an opium den in Del Rio, lifetimes distant, now… near on Moony’s complete negligible shaking weight pressed against Sirius’s leg but he was breathing, trying very hard, holding tightly into the living world. “We’re set,” Sirius said, “Remus, we’re golden, we’re done.” He had never called Moony ever before by his real first name and when he said it something tightened in Moony’s neck beneath his fingers.

“Done,” Moony said, and he spat bile, laughed brutally, a horrible sound. “Ain’t never gonna be done.”

Still Sirius was touching his hair, as though there were nothing else to do. It threaded in his fingers, Moony’s hair, soft, damp with sweat against the back of his neck, creased from his hat and his shirtcollar. “You’re the craziest bravest person I ever knew,” Sirius said. “I near on dropped dead in that look he was giving us.” With Moony’s head against his thigh he could smooth his hair back and tuck each limp curl nesting behind the red shell of his sunburnt ear. “And that drink,” he said, “lord, it smelled like a witches’ brew.”

Moony laughed again, softer. “Cause it was.” There was a splatter of dark birthmarks behind his ear and running down his long neck into the milky unburnt skin beneath his collar. “Tastes like death. Might’ve killed you.” His clammy hand wrapped Sirius’s ankle; he could feel the weak pressure of it. “Hell of a fuckin dose.” 

Nevermind Moony himself had shot it back and taken another that had laid two grown men out. It was likely best to stop thinking about it. “Can you get up?”

“I don’t know,” Moony said, “I don’t know, I don’t know.” Perhaps he would have said it all night. “The moon,” he said, “the light – ” He was slipping again and his eyes rolled shut. Sirius’s fingers were against the pulse in Moony’s neck and he thought for a second he could feel both their heartbeats skittering off each other like teeth across a saloon floor. But it was only Moony’s wild heartbeat and the sound of hell’s drums, or the silence, beating like wings.

Sirius had to haul Moony up and in the end tie him to his pony with the hobbling rope. Chewing hard inside his lip to keep from puking he bound the head up in canvas so the blood wouldn’t make a trail, then he tied the makeshift package to his own saddlehorn and herded both ponies out. Moony slept or whatever, breathing softly, stirring his horse’s braided mane. His bloodied arm had quit dripping but he looked as though he’d plunged his hands up to the elbow in a vat of boiled beets. The wound was open and sluggish, sand caked in it. Once he spoke, a complete gibberish sentence, scrambled tongues, voice clearer than a church bell. The sound of it sent a chill all down Sirius’s spine like a bucket of ice water upended. For a second he expected the door to hell to open at the sound of the spell, or perhaps it was in fact the passcode that would open the door so they could ride out of it.

Moony woke up not far outside of Van Horn just after dawn, blearily, with a pained and hungover groan, carefully extracting his wrists from the hobbling rope. “Goddamn,” he said.

“You were dead out.”

“Clearly seeing as you tied me to my damn horse.” He spat, the liquid thick, dark, perhaps blood. “You got that letter?” Sirius indicated the scroll tucked in his belt. “And – ah, the – is that the – ” The head in its canvas dangled and swung; Moony watched it, looking a bit green.

“Ain’t never gonna forget any of that in all my days,” Sirius said, already trying to. “You feel alright now.”

“Hardly.” Moony sighed. “Anxious dreams.”

You grew up in a cave, Sirius wanted to say, with monsters. In a circle of hell. In death itself, and you ate death itself, for breakfast, for lunch, for dinner; you could only ever eat death, and still it haunts you. Are your dreams ever good?

 --

At the post office in Van Horn they got two telegrams off:

JAMES STOP COYAME CHIHUAHUA STOP WE HAVE A LETTER OF INTRODUCTION STOP REACH US WITH MOONYS PARDON AT HOTEL EL CAPITAN VAN HORN TEXAS STOP PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE ADVISE END

And:

DEAREST TEXAS RANGERS STOP WE HAVE FENRIR GREYBACKS HEAD AT HOTEL EL CAPITAN VAN HORN TEXAS STOP PLEASE ADVISE END

They had breakfast in the hotel restaurant after they had washed up with oily water drawn from the well out back. Sirius ate eggs and bacon and Moony two blackened triangles of dry toast and similarly burnt black coffee that was half chicory. There was blood still set deeply in the beds around his short fingernails and he had wrapped the slice on his arm in clean white cotton which had already begun to turn red and yellow in a crepuscular gradient.

Within two hours the responses had come in and a courier brought them to the bar:

MR BLACK STOP EL PASO DIVISION EN ROUTE TO VAN HORN TO CONFIRM KILL END

And:

SIRIUS STOP MOONY STOP HOLY LIVING FUCK STOP HANG TIGHT STOP WE ARE ON OUR WAY END

Sirius read them aloud then pocketed both alongside the letter from Greyback. Moony was studying him across the table, absently cleaning his pocketknife with his handkerchief and water drawn from his breakfast glass. The plethora of bloods were the same color, dry: rusty brown, like stone. “Sirius,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“I think I want – ”

He was trying many things, many words, sizing them up, how they would fit in his mouth and in his voice and the room and the desert.

“I want to,” he said, “I think I should quit.”

His eyes were a soft milky grey like sage. Kissing him, Sirius thought, somewhat horrifyingly, would be nice. “Okay,” he said. Then the fear welled up, like blood, like oil to the surface after an earthquake. “Remus, if you quit and they make you dose that stuff again, like, to prove it’s good.”

“Might kill me,” he said. “I thought that.” He was spinning his knife in the table and it bored a smooth conical hole. “That’s the thing. Because.” With the hand unspinning the knife he held his head up by the temple. “I never – I don’t want to do it again. But I have to.”

“You don’t have to do anything,” Sirius said. He had a wild idea now, just on the strength of the adrenaline and the lack of sleep, it was rocketing around inside his brain, spinning like a top. “You can tell Dumbledore to fuck himself. We can just tell them all Riddle’s in Coyame and get gone. You got your pardon, we got Greyback’s head, soon we’ll get the money, there’ll be no further contract.”

“The letter,” Moony said. “It’s clearly us, in the letter. That gets us real close. And at the bottom line, not a one of y’all know this business and I do.” He was right. It was like a knife. He lifted it and stabbed the table; the knife stood straight, handle quivering, embedded by its point. “We can’t back out of this, Sirius; it’s a thousand times bigger than us.” The wound on his forearm was bleeding again sluggishly through the gauze. He leant back and regarded Sirius around the trembling blade. “After. I swear to God, after.” 

Sirius didn’t have the heart to say, okay, but what if there is no after?


	5. V.

V.

Another Dream – the Upstairs Room – About Quitting – Sirius’s Apology – Comfort – the Scout Group – a Walk on the Desert – a Fight – Ultimatum – a Kiss – Locusts – Reassurance from Sirius – the Sublime

 

Time leapt sideways through space or years. Someone was stroking his hair, then the ground was moving through the spinning darkness. He dreamt, shuffledly, about the sea. He had seen it all of thrice in his young life and he dreamt about going down to the water at Coronado, seventeen. He had been with an odd outfit of men who dyed their clothing red-violet in vats of boiled insects and ate bits of mushrooms and cacti and claimed visions. He crouched in the sand with the spume of it eddying round his bare feet dragging flotsam from who knows where. He walked Northwards on the beach toward the long plateau that dropped to the sea and after a while came upon the rotting carcass of a whale. The sunblackened flesh was hanging in strips from the massive white bones and the whole wild carnage of it was picked at by wheeling, screaming white birds. That there could once have been life so large jarred something inside him and he walked quickly up the beach and back to town where the rest of the outfit waited at the bunkhouse. In three days time they would ride out to Imperial County. In the dream though the corpse on the beach was not a whale’s and there were four of them recognizable only by the scraps of their hair because their noses had been chewed away and their eyes eaten out by the indignant birds for the rich jelly of them.

He woke in a quiet upstairs room and remembered select fragments that developed slowly. The Texas Rangers out of El Paso had met him and Sirius downstairs in the hotel bar, unrolled Greyback's head from the bloody canvas on the wood floor to the shock of the bar’s three other patrons, and conferred amongst themselves. "Found him dead," Sirius had said charmingly, as ever masterfully beyond reproach as a liar, "freshly so. Likely overdose, no?" Remus was chainsmoking and didn’t open his mouth once, sure he would vomit if he did, tasting the bile against the back of his throat just at the sight of the thing. The Rangers had passed the gold over and Sirius and Remus had had another whiskey in near-silence and quasi-celebration and decided to spring for an upstairs stateroom on account of how long it had been since either of them had slept in a bed of any kind. The furniture in the room constituted two small beds and between them a nighttable just beneath the window, and the air smelled like old wet laundry and like desert, it was very still – it had not been breathed in a long time. Perhaps it had never passed through people like them. Down in the bar over toast he could hardly stomach Remus had told Sirius he planned on quitting. Sirius had agreed that he should but couldn't at the present juncture. It was the bridge with which he alone could straddle life and death and somehow people had come to depend on him for it.

Now he looked at the chemist's bottle and water glass he had set out on the nighttable for himself before he lay down and his stomach turned, maybe out of the need of it, maybe something worse. Only death was in there, he understood. Death was in there silently playing solitaire. He couldn’t shake how dead he had felt in that place and how even the dose had felt like being run over by something, a full locomotive perhaps, how it had felt for a split second like too much. How death came screaming at him and stopped a hair’s breadth from his nose. Most sincerely he could not shake how all the fear and certainty had cleared like the haze burning off at sunset when Sirius had touched his hair. Stroked his hair, rather, like a mom, or a lover. Like someone he decidedly Was Not. Whoever he was, he was certainly among the final things keeping Remus stuck in the world and still he had dragged him in there by his shirtcollar perhaps to die. He knew Sirius would’ve been laid out comatose if not dead even just by the drink if he’d taken it. It was for the far gone and now Remus knew he had to count himself among that order.

He’d known Greyback would be sodding with it thus a big dose more would be enough to get the door open and let the heavy sleep of it through. He had always been greedy hence his ire when Remus had gone off on his own. Hence his entitlement to things that did not belong to him and were never freely given. Dope, money, children, bodies –

To think he had started in on this to relieve his pain and now it in itself was his pain and perhaps the primary constituent thereof.

There was a soft knock and then Sirius pushed in the door, holding a sparkling glass with a finger of tequila jeweltoned in the bottom, and after some fidgety hesitation he sat on the edge of the bed in which Remus lay, fisting his free hand in the sunbleached quilt. He sighed a few times before he could even speak. “I should’ve – well lemme tell you if you really wanna quit Moony I won’t leave your side. I’ll fight each and every one of them off for you and that’s a promise.”

Remus knew he would. He wouldn’t’ve said a thing he didn’t mean on the subject. It felt as though something unspoken had passed between them and they could not lie to each other any more, but perhaps it was just a dearly wishful thought. “James and them ain’t got this close in four years trying. We’re on his damn doorstep Sirius and I can’t fuck it up, I won’t fuck it up.”

Sirius pushed the rubber heel of his boot against the floorboards and drew it back nervously. Against the joints it made a low bass sound like something slowly falling down a flight of stairs. He clattered the golden ring he wore arhythmically against his glass and finally Remus had to stay his hand before he lost his mind. Even with just two fingers on Sirius’s wrist Remus could feel his pulse, his warmth, had to resist the urge to hang on. “Goddamn,” he said, “Moony, I can’t imagine.”

“Then don’t.”

The little animal had been awake for awhile but now it was pacing about inside him and scratching restlessly. Remus shut his eyes. He would have to feed it and the thought – it made him beg, it made him sick, in the same breath. Sirius put his empty glass down on the nighttable beside the chemist bottle and Remus could smell his breath and his apprehension. “Can I – do you need – ”

“I liked it when you were touchin my hair.”

Sirius exhaled like he’d been punched but he said “Alright.” He shifted, the bedsprings complained. His fingers were very long and sticky and the pads of them were callused and rough and his nails ragged and gently he tucked Remus’s hair behind his ear. Probably on account of the damn heat he was thinking about swimming. He had grown up swimming in the lakes on his father’s property in Tennessee. There were concord grapes with thick warm violet skins that grew in the bush. The tight greenness of that territory and the smell of the distant storms – thunder. Rain that came for days. Remus opened his eyes again and saw that Sirius leant over him, smelling like tequila and blood and in his unwashed hair still the smoke, the burning mezcal. “Moony,” he said.

“You can call me by my real name.”

“Alright,” he said, “Remus – ”

“You can do anything you want. I don’t care.” I don’t feel anything, he wanted to say, have you fucking noticed? You can touch me, I don’t care. You could lace me to shit or you could make love to me and it would be the same. Nothing will happen because I am stone. I am bones and this thing, alone. Itself the puppeteer…

He wished there was anything he could have given to Sirius or anyone that wasn’t hollow like a sucked-out eggshell. His heart, for one, or his body – even that. It was all the hunger.

“Remus, I can’t –”

“For God’s sake you keep hangin on me.”

“You don’t mind it?”

“You’d be fuckin dead if I minded it, you shit.”

Sirius ducked his head and pressed his mouth against the high bridge of Remus’s cheekbone. He thought it was a surprising place for a kiss until he remembered what he looked like. The light shifted on the floor refracting through Sirius’s glass and Remus’s chemist bottle there on the nighttable beside the open window and the breeze stirred the curtains. Remus shut his eyes again, tightly, held them shut until the black space generated supernovas. The bedsprings complained once more and Sirius lay down between Remus and the wall and his thumb passed a few times over the gauze bandage wrapping the knife wound. He was breathing against Remus’s shirtcollar ponderously, as if thinking of things to say. The chewing, the chewing, the chewing. Remus was trembling before he even knew he was. Each grain of sand of him displaced violently, sliding from a faultline. He thought the first time it had happened he had hardly even known what it was. And around him a corps of dead men, drinking up the cure for it dissolved in pure alcohol. They would sharpen eyedroppers against sheaves of sandstone and push the razorlike end beneath their skin. God, it had been ten years and he was still cutting his teeth on the same shit and it couldn’t stop, it wouldn’t stop, perhaps it shouldn’t. Who would it even be? The other self he drowned and had been lost now inside him half his life. How could anyone love that person? It took him a while to realize the tightness he felt around his chest was not in fact his lungs constricting in panic but rather Sirius holding him tightly.

By the time the sky was dark Sirius had fallen asleep and his arm had loosened enough Remus could untangle himself and sit and drip a bit of the laudanum on his tongue.

 --

Remus woke before dawn and slipped out of bed and walked alone through the quiet streets while the sun peeled up, spreading blues and reds through the pale-washed world. He had found that the drug affixed certain memories over others notwithstanding his attempts to control the situation and it was continually the worst and strangest in the forefront, vivid in color, circling on a tight loop. He recalled more of his youth than he would have liked to. Now he recalled the texture of Greyback’s hair, the blood streaming between his fingers, despite his continual trying to push it to the side. He remembered the dream about the faceless corpses on the beach and somewhere he remembered the quick flash from his dream weeks previous, or perhaps decades, Sirius walking before him through a field of red flowers. Poppies, he realized, with a sudden shock to his gut, Sirius walking before him through a field of poppies.

In the brisk dawn light a scouting group in Confederate grey was moving out to the West. They wore their sharply-cut and starchly ironed uniforms as they saddled up their skittish horses and polished their weapons with pristine white cloth. Remus crossed the street and they took no notice. When he walked around again to the hotel Sirius was sitting on the front steps with a cigarette and a stained, once-white mug of chicory coffee watching at the garrison in silence. When he saw Remus something very sad filled his eyes like water drawn into the dry washes and Remus wanted to hurt him, seeing it. “Woke me up with the rattling,” he explained.

“They gotta be damn careful when they come down here,” Remus said, thinking of James.

They walked together into the desert hardly speaking. It was like they had to get far enough out they could discuss it. After a while the town was distant and wavering in the growing heat and spreading haze like a mirage and a door unlocked; Remus said “Sorry you saw any of that.” Sirius turned but he couldn’t look Remus quite in the eye. “I didn’t remember it was so bad.”

“I just hate – thinking of – you were a kid. It’s like you were raised by wolves.”

“I raised myself,” he said. Perhaps he did have some wolf in him come to think of it. “Just like you. I’m not a fraction as fragile as you suppose I am.” 

“Ain’t never supposed you are.”

“You’ve been falling all over yourself the last twenty four hours despairing over my disappeared innocence.”

Sirius seemed to have gathered the bravery or perhaps the anger itself a twin of Remus’s own and fixed him in the eyes. “Moony, I watched you saw a guy’s fuckin head off.”

Moony, his brain reminded, you sawed off the head of the guy who sliced you open and cut your guts out and got you catching his goddamn sickness. He filled you up with the sickness until you were gagging on it. He gave you that name lest you fucking forget, and now he’s dead and you did the deed and yet he’s still breathing down your goddamn neck. How’d you let that happen? “Sirius, you’re wearing a goddamn human heart as a necklace and that weren’t the first fuckin’ head I’ve sawed off.” It was in fact only the second in his memory. Regardless he was sure Sirius had sawed off more. They were squaring around each other like scrapping dogs and Remus knew there were two ways out of this now and likely both would hurt. He thought he had always suspected one day they were gonna bed each other down one way or the other. “I ain’t someone you need to watch on every minute and I ain’t someone you could ever hurt if you fuckin tried and I ain’t someone whose shit you need to possess yourself handling because I can handle my own shit and I always have.”

Perhaps it was instinctual given his upbringing but Remus had noticed when Sirius got cornered whether physically or in an argument he gesticulated with a wild defensiveness of hands. “If you don’t need me to do any of that shit like have your fuckin back like a basically decent human being what the fuck do you need me to do.”

“For God’s fuckin sake,” he said. There was absolutely no going back now and it was like he had lit a fuse on it and the circle flame was running and running throwing sparks off toward the payload. “I need you to get the fuck over yourself and your goddamn preconceptions and fuck me, Sirius Black, that’s what I need.” The sun was fully up now and already blistering the earth and distantly Remus heard the Confederate legion ride out toward New Mexico perhaps to drive the Apache out or perhaps to secure the run to the South, to Mexico, the backwater route of the South’s cotton shipping. He wondered if they knew Tom Riddle; perhaps they did. The sky was a vivid and violent blue and in the silence, the rhythmic running of his own heartbeat. “I need you to get this whole fuckin debacle over with before it drives both of us even more fuckin nuts than we already are.”

Sirius took a deep slow breath and pinched the bridge of his nose tightly and said, “Remus I never fuckin know how right the mind is that you’re in – ”

“If you tell me you wanna wait til I quit I’ll shoot you where you fuckin stand. Given not yesterday morning we were sitting down there in the bar and you told me I gotta stick this devil thing out. Given the only fuckin version of me you ever known is me with this thing.”

“It just – ” It dawned on Remus he should perhaps let Sirius get a word in edgewise. “I don’t fancy thinkin I’m forcin you and Lily said you didn’t like fucking and you never had.”

“I don’t care what she told you or about any of that anymore.”

“I don’t know, Remus, perhaps you should.”

They were standing so close Remus could nearly count the fine jaw hairs Sirius had missed shaving and smell the leather of the heart and the oil with which he cleaned his gun and the smell of him just, or his hair, like whiskey, sweat, blood, dust. Something warm spilled in his heart and all through down him like not any drug but near on the pure screaming relief of it – “Sirius, you can’t tell me what to do.”

They leant in to kiss one another at the same time with such fervor they bumped foreheads. Remus felt his lip split on his chipped tooth and tasted blood; perhaps it was Sirius’s, whose hair was coming out of the knot against the back of his neck and was very soft from having not been washed. When they each pulled away Remus was holding the back of Sirius’s shirt very tightly in a fist like driftwood for his undear life and both their mouths were bloody red, tasting like gunmetal. He smoothed the blood from Sirius’s lip with a thumb and licked it away. They scrambled back down over the rough country very quickly to the hotel and up the creaking stairs two by two to their room where Sirius was on him almost before the door clicked shut and neither of them could get out of their clothes quick enough. Distantly he was aware of the twanging in his cut arm and the shuffle of Sirius’s bad leg but far away in a corner of his brain not immediately and completely possessed by Sirius’s hand in his pants or his own hand in Sirius’s pants, their forearms crossed and pressing, the kissing violent and with teeth, almost vengeful, the taste of blood, the smell of it, of sweat, of the stillness in the room, of the morning, of chicory and coffee, of the stiff desert wind, of haze – haze and blood, the stillness, the feeling, which was like a cup filling up, like how in a chemist’s you could watch them mix it and the yearning was so pure, so present, tugging at your gut and lower, like a spool of yarn unraveling, the sound, like breathing, like Sirius breathing, hard, through his nose, an embarrassing sort of moan sound one of them made, which was swallowed, teeth clicking, the birds at the window, the birds, the birds, something like static in his ears, growing, a soft blurry hum, growing and growing, like a swarm of locusts coming, like their wings – is this truly happening to me, Remus thought, before everything turned white, or am I inside his body?

 --

“I don’t feel,” Remus said, “I don’t feel anything, I thought I would. About killing him.”

He was sitting tangled with Sirius against the wall by the door whereupon they had just about collapsed minutes previous. Both their trousers were still undone and he felt sticky all over with sweat and otherwise and his heartbeat was fluttering the damp fabric of his shirt. Sirius’s lips were very red and slightly parted and his eyes were very soft. Outside the dry heat of the day was building and the breeze had warmed and picked dust up that had begun to settle in red waves on the windowpane. Sirius said “Maybe, I don’t know – it’ll be later, it’ll come later. Hard to feel any kind of closure about it considering it’s opened another damn box. Plus I mean the act of killin itself never makes you feel good, no matter how bad the man or how good the money. If it did you’d be well and truly sick.”

Remus wanted to say, nothing’s ever felt good to me that I can remember except getting high and just now that. Does that make me well and truly sick? Instead he said, “What do you think James is gonna wanna do now.”

“Jesus,” Sirius said, “I don’t wanna talk about James with my cock out.” Remus laughed and found he couldn’t stop. Everything was hilarious. “All I’ll say on the subject is I imagine they gonna have some damn stupid idea involving you and I in more certain death scenarios.”

“I expect.”

“They don’t understand I have some ideas involving you and I in other sorts of scenarios entirely and I like to think you’ve entertained the same.”

“Perhaps a few.” He had also entertained the certain death scenarios though those were fleeting and mostly dreamed and now seemed impossible. How could they die now after everything that had already happened? “I had this dream about you walking in a field of flowers.”

“Seems awful chaste.”

Remus laughed. “I woke up from it and just about ran away to jerk off.”

“Would’ve helped you out with that.”

“Would’ve killed you if you tried.”

“Lily said that too. She said not to underestimate your lack of carnal instinct. Nor your ability to kill a man.”

“Damn smart woman.”

“Yes, very much, in all ways except her continued involvement with James.”

Remus laughed again. He knew Lily’s family was out of Portland having travelled overland from the East when she was very young and he knew they were near on as bad as his folks or Sirius’s and thus she was almost certainly in this whole thing as a mechanism with which to mastermind her own escape from the situation, but still James was a fairly absurd choice. “I thought you said you didn’t want to talk about James with your cock out.”

“I fuckin don’t,” Sirius said, laughing, “but it keeps coming around back to that and I think we oughta do something to keep our minds off it.”

“Pity I can’t think of anything,” Remus told him. He couldn’t keep the smile off his face. “Do you have suggestions?”

“A couple.”

“Yeah?” His heart had started to pick up again like it had sniffed something out in the air.

“Yeah.”

“Like what?”

Sirius had that wicked thing in his face that served to make him look completely beyond reproach and it made Remus want to enact vengeance of whatever variety. “Want me to show you?”

In the middle of it Remus didn’t even know what Sirius was doing but the feeling in it was sublime, he thought, a word Sirius had taught him a long time ago on the desert, a feeling between pleasure and fear. There was a single corner remaining in his brain where the lights were dim but otherwise things were functioning almost normal and in that single corner he thought, I have never let anyone see me like this before. And in that – because no one has ever wanted to, and because I especially have never wanted to, and why? It comes down to trust, he thought, and the lights were flickering, I don’t trust anyone, I hardly trust myself, I trust him.


	6. VI.

VI.

Morning – Scouting to the West – Corpses by the River – Swimming in the Rio Grande – Around Us Even the Desert is Alive – Arrival of the Cavalry – Setting Up Court – Relating the Tale – Snape’s Suspicion – the Blacks – Reassurance from James

 

The sun came in weakly through the window and the drawn curtains heralding dawn and Sirius woke to the sound of desert birds and watched the light move upon the floor. He had woken from shuffled dreams about Moony who constituted the soft warmth and the sound of breath between him and the wall and who had thrown his cut arm still wrapped in the dirty cotton bandage over Sirius’s hip. He stirred when Sirius moved and pressed closer in the chill in the room.

“Moony.”

“Hmm.”

“How you come to be called Moony?”

Sirius could feel him wake up. He shifted and his muscles tightened and his palm curled against Sirius’s belly. “Showed up at Greyback’s on the night of the full moon. Ain’t nothin to it.”

“You want me to call you by your real name?”

He took a deep, slow breath. “No one does.”

“I would if you wanted.”

Moony was quiet for a second. Then he said, “Just when we’re. Just between us two.” He was walking two cold fingers up the ridge of Sirius’s spine very slowly.

“Alright,” said Sirius. Then, for no reason, “Remus, I was dreaming about you.”

“What was I doing.”

“Hardly remember,” he said. “You were naked though.”

Behind him Moony yawned violently then slid a very cold palm over Sirius’s ribs and pressed his knee into the back of Sirius’s thigh. “I – ah, I still am.”

 --

They went down in an hour to eat breakfast in the hotel bar then they rode out into the desert around just to scout. The sun was already high out of the East and hot and the wind passing down heavily out of the mountains pulling sand up around the stripped junipers. They rode with the wind into the West thinking they would ride to the river that demarcated the border and then along it a ways. Neither of them had been in Mexico now going on six years. The haze and the blowing sand swallowed that territory and over every rise was a new expanse of landscape seemingly interminable and without parallel into the muted sky. Moony – Remus – had pulled his hat low over his eyes and Sirius kept looking at him and could not stop. To think he had found the lone hospitable thing in this wild place and it was this person with skin so thick he’d gotten under somehow. Not to mention he’d also gotten under the clothes, which were torn up with age in places – it was like the sight of his scabby knee against the torn and bloodstained blue fabric of his jeans was enough to make Sirius’s mouth dry up, or it was just deathly hot. Both their shadows were cast perhaps miles over the plain and they hardly spoke on account of how very loud it seemed into the silence.

They rode past bones, sun-bleached, just past midday, and not long after they rode unto the edge of the steep brown clay cliff down to the lush green strip along the Rio Grande. The stench had arisen and blown up a few yards distant but they did not see the source of it until they dismounted and led their horses down a wash to the beach, where the water blackened with blood arisen from six corpses mostly stripped of their Confederate grey and scalped, two crucified, all castrated, eyes pecked out by the wheeling desert birds, black shadows against the sky and the sun. The horses shied and snorted and paced, eyes blown white. Remus had taken his hat off perhaps in some gesture of removed respect and with the other hand he held the collar of his shirt over his narrow face and approached because likely he had seen worse in his young life. “Like to be Indians,” he said, voice tight, perhaps just with the smell of it. “Apache or Comanche. Taken the horses and the flag and all the shiny stuff. This the same garrison that rode out yesterday from Van Horn.”

“Ain’t none of their arrows around, though.”

“Well they take em back so they can use em again.” He came back around over to Sirius and put his hat back on. “Rebels gonna have a mighty hard time out here as I guess they’re just now learnin.”

“What are they even tryin to do?”

“I suppose they think if they can drive the Indians out they got an easier run to ship the cotton out the back way. Plus they don’t think anyone’s hardly human but white people.” The wind picked up through the canyon stirring up white caps on the water and lifted with it the smell and they both turned away from it; Remus dry-heaved and the horses skittered. “Oughta ride out,” he said, coughing. “Birds are hungry.”

They rode a few miles downriver at the rim of the canyon keeping ears peeled but there were only the sounds of birds and wind and the churning movement of the water. If they’d been caught eye of they were dead anyway, Sirius reasoned, so there was no need to really be nervous. Around the meridian of that day they found a copse of cottonwoods and dismounted and left their horses to graze on the leafy foliage and ate the bread and jerky they’d brought with them from the hotel. Remus walked off as though he had to piss but he came back with his eyes such that Sirius knew he’d taken his drops. When the breeze came through it stirred his hair; he’d taken his hat off and was tracing the brim of it fascinatedly with one crooked white finger. “We could swim,” he said, voice sounding far away.

They hobbled their ponies and left their guns atop the piles of their clothes on the shore to hold the fabric down in the breeze. The water was cold and tasted like silt and a bit of the tang of blood. When Sirius surfaced Remus was staring at him. He had submerged up to the bridge of his nose and the water cast a bright line across his face just beneath the scar. Then he half-stood, water dripping from his ears. “You said you were shot three times.”

“Yessir.”

“I been wonderin where’s the third at.”

It was on his back on his left shoulderblade, he’d been hit running and had kept running. The mark was a killer and horsethief out of Omaha who Sirius had later strangled with his own bolo tie and whose head he had handed in with great relish to the Nebraskan territorial authorities. The whole affair had gone down along the South Platte River where the guy had a working gold claim. Sirius had picked it up for a few months following out of nothing else to do and his desperate need for money to pay the doctor who had done something passable about his splintered-up shoulder. He had given Sirius a bottle of laudanum and he had looked at it for several days and never opened it despite the screaming pain, thinking of Remus. Come to think of it he had done a lot of thinking of Remus in the interim. Sirius had turned to show him and felt him press two careful fingers against the scar was then something softer, his mouth, then his mouth again against the back of Sirius’s neck. His heart did a gentle leap as did other parts of him. He’d thought this whole affair deeply erotic weeks previous in Albuquerque before they were allowed to touch each other, Remus very wet and very high – he imagined perhaps the water felt to him like being touched all over, very softly, by someone’s mouth, someone’s tongue, because of how he moved, in this slow and languorous way, as though continually ensconced in this sensual haze – and he’d snuck off to rub one out after it seemed Remus had fallen asleep. When he turned around Remus was very close to him and caught his mouth up before he could shut his eyes; it was a gentle kiss but there was current in it, tugging at the backs of his knees underwater. When he pulled away Remus’s eyes were a dark vivid grey like a thunderstorm gathering or like mineral clay. The question was out of his mouth before he knew he was even asking it – “How does it – Remus, what does it feel like?”

Somehow he got it. “Like this,” he said, voice soft and hoarse and only a little sad, against Sirius’s mouth, “near on the same. Only more – ”

 --

They rode that day and the next about that landscape divided across the lid of itself with a current of sky that blew sparse empty cloud pulling apart like cotton and twice more they found corpses. In the night on the porch of the hotel in Van Horn they sat on the stoop having a nightcap close beside each other with their knees touching. Sirius thought it was like a dream that kept changing with hardly a connection between events. It so happened they would ride into the craggy sphinxlike mountains flanking the valley and find there the bodies of Confederate scouts arrayed ritualistically and decaying and shredding blackened pieces under the sun’s white eye and they would ride on and quit for water or coffee or food and Remus would be on him and they would be quickly naked or nearly so and grappling without sound but for their breath. I’m alive, Sirius thought, in the face of it. I’m alive despite everything and this world is real and in the knowing of that is the only true certainty accessible to me… I’m alive and here with me is another person also alive, or mostly, and around us even the desert is alive.

 --

The cavalry rode in from the North not four days after they'd sent James the telegram. Sirius supposed they must've dropped everything in the precinct, saddled up, and hauled out with naught but the clothes on their backs and their guns. In their attempt at relative inconspicuousness in that hostile and contested territory they had eschewed uniforms and rode single-file in a line of a dozen; they looked like a scalphunting party or smugglers or scouts. Heading it up was Dumbledore, who had buttoned his long white beard into his shirt, and taking up the rear was James; beside him, somehow unsurprisingly, was Lily, astride her own high-stepping pinto pony and very pregnant, dressed in pants patched at the knee and bound about her waist with thin rope. Peter rode with them, closer to the rear of the column, and so did a man Sirius recognized as the deputy Remus had once shot, Snape, his hooked nose recognizable even beneath his hat's long shadow. Sirius and Remus were drinking mezcal out on the hotel stoop in the golden waning of the day and watched the dust rising on the Northward horizon; they rose to greet the party somewhat reluctantly, Remus’s knees cracking, when Sirius recognized Dumbledore at its head. James caught Sirius's eye and his expression warmed considerably beneath his hat. "Goddamn, he said, dismounting and ducking around the snorting, exhausted ponies to help Lily down, "Sirius, Moony, goddamn." 

Lily dismounted like a gymnast entirely without James's help and Sirius saw the flash of silver gunmetal at her hip. Her hair was strewn about sweatily across her face under her hat and she looked very beautiful, if sunburned, if breathless. "Gentlemen," she said.

They brought the ponies to the stable round back and then set up court in the hotel stateroom, pushing inkstained tables together and mismatched antique chairs into a loose circle. One of the deputies disappeared and came back stacked with several glasses and two bottles of whiskey, which were distributed throughout. Dumbledore sat in a high-backed blue velvet chair, the fabric sunbleached in contrast with his fine clothing, and called the room to order. "Gentlemen and lady," he began, because Lily sat with them as well, alone undrinking, having somewhat arrayed her hair in a loose braid, at James's left beside Remus, who was beside Sirius, who was beside Peter. "We stand the closest we have yet stood to complete eradication of the major smuggling artery posing an economic threat to the state of California." He didn't dare mention the Union and Sirius couldn’t blame him given their uncertain surroundings. "Thanks in particular to these two men." He indicated with one long and heavily ringed hand Remus and Sirius sitting beside each other before one wide window in the milky sunset. James, Peter, and Lily alone applauded, though perhaps unnecessarily prolongedly. Remus was blushing even through his sunburn. "How about you two tell us where the situation stands at present." 

Remus looked rapidly to Sirius with a somewhat desperate expression which communicated transference of this responsibility. He was hardly sure where to start but jumped into the thick of it: "Five days ago we found Fenrir Greyback's camp and Moony and I – we made sort of a fake deal. We told him we were looking for a bigger distributor South of the border and needed a contact so he gave us one, Riddle, he said, the name, I expect it's familiar. He wrote us a letter of introduction, I mean, me and Moony. Shortly thereafter he, ah, expired. Texas Rangers out of El Paso accepted his head as bounty next morning and here we are." 

"And as to the manner of his expiry – " 

"Dose laid him out," said Remus, hoarse and soft and his voice silencing, like a snowfall, "that is, dose of the stuff we're supposed to have thieved and supposed to be selling." He had taken the bandage off his cut arm the day before. The wound was long and red and angry and hungry, Sirius thought, like the rest of him. "Which'd be pure hospital grade morphine." A soft buzz went around the room and subsided. "Damn risky to thieve these days from the supply trains and worth its weight in gold for resale.”

“Who might this be,” someone said from Dumbledore’s left. He looked like he’d been beat to shit in one too many streetfights and he had an eye missing; the glass replacement rolled sickeningly.

Peter opened his mouth and was cut off by a flat voice like the tolling of a harsh bell from the man with the hooked nose, Snape. “That’d be Moony Lupin,” he said, “late one of the state’s most wanted criminals.”

“Yessir,” Remus said, and the attention of the room turned back to him, now with an investigatory breed of morbid curiosity. Sirius thought he looked like the most fantastically resilient person he had ever known. He was cut up all over and the inkspill shades of it varying and he wore bloody clothes and a gun filigreed with someone else’s girl’s name and a very weary smile. And just beneath his collar so as you could only see the mark if you were really looking hard for it, the bruise shape of Sirius’s mouth expanding in soft reds and purples like the inside flesh of a plum.

Snape turned to Dumbledore. “I’m unsure when we elected to hand the reigns of this operation over to a hophead felon and a bottom-tier bounty hunter.”

James was on his feet instantly with the force of it shoving his armchair back several inches but Lily spoke up, voice clear. “Calm down, Severus, you’re just bitter ‘cause he shot you.”

“Mr. Lupin has gained his pardon in exchange for the very useful position his hard work’s put us in,” Dumbledore explained to the table.

“Thievin medicine from Union shipments, you mean.”

“Weren’t necessarily Union and ain’t necessarily medicine,” Remus said evenly. “And ain’t nothing gonna get you close to these people ‘cept a product.” No one stood to argue with that, and James sat down. “Used to run a bit with Greyback and let me tell you this has been rough country always. Can’t trust no one.”

“How do we know,” Snape said, voice bitter, bitter as laudanum, “that we can trust you.”

“Trust him with my goddamn life,” said James very loudly. Everyone’s heads snapped to stare but Dumbledore’s most kindly. “Trust them both with my goddamn life and have before, thank you, Severus.”

“Do you two suggest a course of action?” This from Dumbledore, skillfully deflecting.

“Well there’s the obvious,” said Sirus, “which’d be that Moony and I are described in the letter. We can ride on down to Coyame with it, infiltrate ranks, set a deal up to be carried out elsewhere at which of course y’all are waitin to ambush.”

“Need backup for that considering he’ll sure as hell have troops,” James said. “Getting ours down here would cause a hell of a lot of trouble as this whole thing is supposed to be off the books. Moony, what about – how’d you go about knockin out Greyback?”

“He took too big a dose of that stuff,” said Remus, “I was kind of countin on him bein considerably greedier than he ever was smart. Riddle’s good and he’ll get someone else to dose it.”

“It’s quite clear that letter’s the thing, though,” said Lily. Clearly half the older men around the table were shocked by even her presence. “That’ll get you in. We have to use it.”

“And, Mr. Black,” said Dumbledore. He was studying Sirius with a kind of sympathetic kindness that suggested he deeply regretted already what he was about to say, and Sirius’ heart twisted up recognizing it. He felt Remus looking at him, and Lily, and James, and Peter, each with something edging on fear – for him, with him. “I thought, Mr. Black, your parents.”

 --

They spoke into the night but Sirius was hardly listening and instead hearkening to the increasingly painful sensation of the roaring inside his brain. Remus was watching him bite his nails, worrying at a hole in his jeans until he could worm three fingers through it. The silence stretched far past even uncomfortable and Lily announced she needed some air. James offered his arm but she took Remus’s instead and Dumbledore announced the meeting was adjourned and would recommence for breakfast. Remus went with Lily out into the dry garden and the smooth cotton moonlight and James and Peter stayed, with Sirius, until the room emptied out. “I as good as begged him not to bring that up,” James said as soon as the door clicked shut on the last man’s back. “Your folks. I said it was cruel and unusual.”

“It is, James, very much.” Perhaps he was very tired too and he had been now for months. “I know it’s – well, cliché, and pathetic. But to be so small – for there to be fourteen of us, in the face of – he’s one thing, Riddle is, but this is turning into the fourteen of us and the whole damn Confederacy. They ain’t gonna give this up easy. And you can bet your ass he’s working for them now, or rather I suppose they’re working for him.”

It was turning into himself, a self-made orphan and indeed a bottom-tier bounty hunter, facing the grand defining trauma of his parents’ very existence, facing the notorious Expectations of the state sheriff of California, facing the desert, facing a secessionist army, facing a smuggler of mythic proportions, facing Remus, who it seemed loved him and whose apparent love was terrifying first above all. And now facing Lily, who was fucking pregnant, facing James, who couldn’t tell a single lie to him and never had, and facing Peter, who was trying to put a very brave face on, but who was scared shitless.

“Part of me just wants to back out of this whole damn thing but I won’t,” said James, somehow voicing exactly what Sirius was thinking. “It’s so much bigger than me and it terrifies me but I won’t back out.” Of course he was saying it because he knew Sirius wouldn’t either.

“This is history,” Peter agreed, “already happening, dear God.”

They were quiet for a minute and in the silence heard Lily laugh in the garden. James kind of smiled without meaning to. Then he said, masterfully deflecting, “I had a suspicion Moony was gonna kill Greyback.”

“Place was a hedonistic apocalypse nightmare beyond reason,” Sirius said. “Complete nihilistic abandon. Thought I’d gotten dosed somehow and was seeing things. Still can hardly believe that happened on this earth. Our Moony cut the guy’s head off with a goddamn sword.”

“What happened to his arm?” Peter asked.

“He dosed that stuff too. Don’t know how he fuckin lived.” He looked over James’s shoulder into the garden but it was all shadows. “He told me he wanted to quit.”

“What’d you say?”

“I don’t know, if he quits and then we go meet Riddle and he has to dose it and prove it’s good…”

“Goddamn,” Peter said.

“Too risky, he says.” Too risky, I said. “He said he would after.” It was howling inside his head again: WHAT IF THERE IS NO AFTER.

“Be good then to have friends around and help him through it,” James said, but he was thinking it too; Sirius could tell, it was in his eyebrows.

“He’ll barricade the fuckin door,” said Sirius fondly. Thinking of it almost kind of warmed his heart. That there could be a house they were all in and in some upstairs room Remus was puking his guts out, but his guts and everything else. Every trace of it. “So we all have to make it to after. So that Moony can quit and so that I can meet your baby.” James laughed though there was something very sad in it and Peter elbowed him in the side. “Gonna be one beautiful fuckin baby, goddamn.”

“Don’t I know it. Mostly on Lily’s account.”

“You self-deprecating fuck.” Sirius said. Peter toasted James with the scant meniscus of whiskey left in his glass and Sirius followed suit. “You’re the most beautiful man I’ve ever known.”

They clinked whiskeys and downed the rest then straightened the room back up and brought the empty cups and bottles to the darkened, vacant bar. James hugged him in the dark, tightly, smelling like dust, and Peter shook his hand. Then they climbed the stairs to their separate rooms. Sirius lit the bottleglass lantern and undressed and lay in the semidarkness staring at the wave patterns of the waterstains in the ceiling and trying not to think, or trying to only think about Remus, and even then trying to think only about Remus smiling, waiting for him to come back up from the garden.


	7. VII.

VII.

Hell from Lily – a Promise – Sirius’s Folks – Dumbledore’s Plan – Death Trip Enacted – “We Ain’t Gonna Die” – Escorted Out – the Road to Coyame – Skull and Snakes – God – the Saloon – the Band – Bellatrix Lestrange – Spinning the Story – Bellatrix’s Deal – the Road Out

 

Not so soon had Lily shut the door behind them than she wormed her fingers into Remus’s collar and shifted the fabric aside revealing the purpling bruise Sirius had left just between his neck and shoulder. “I thought,” she said, somewhat venomously, “you didn’t like fucking.”

“Well I never did before,” Remus told her indignantly. “I never did on any occasion before and it was a shock to even me – Lily, how the fuck long have you been pregnant?”

“Ain’t none of your goddamn business.”

“Thought you were gonna skin James alive next you saw him after I spilled the beans.”

“Yeah well I started to,” said Lily, “then it all Devolved, like, when he saw my belly. He asked me to marry him and all that shit. Cried also – quite a damn bit if I do say so.”

“What’d you say?”

“Well I’m fucking pregnant Moony you daft shithead,” she barked, “what the fuck else am I gonna do?” Remus laughed and he thought Lily smiled, a quick flash of her white teeth visible in the darkness. “Then there was the, ooh Lily, come on down with us as the camp cook. Course I didn’t mention I could burn water. Never been to Texas.” She yawned. “How long’d you hold out.”

“How long’d I hold what out.”

“Your goddamn virtue,” she said, and cackled. “It’s dark as pitch out here and I can still tell you’re blushing.”

“I don’t know,” said Remus, “I was feeling really bad and he kept doing nice things. Thought I was gonna go out my goddamn mind so I told him to get the fuck on with it.”

“Told him you ain’t never liked sex and seemed unlike the type to turn around on a thing like that.”

“You probably put the damn thought in his head to give it a go attempting to seduce me.”

Lily cocked an eyebrow. “James said when you four were locked up in Del Rio he and Pete were scared past shitless of you being as you were sliced up across the face and sick as a damn dog. And by all rights Sirius should’ve been but he weren’t. James said he as good as carried you to a teahouse to get your fix. He always had some fuckin thing for ya and you’d’ve seen it if you weren’t so addled.” She looked up for a second, squinting into the moon’s round eye, then she fixed Remus again. “Plus I had to tell him cause I know if he’d’ve made a move on you without your express permission you’d’ve laced him probably nearabouts to death even if you would’ve wanted something to happen deep down.”

The little thing was awake and pacing and chewing on the end of his temper again shortening it rapidly. “Lily,” he started, “I don’t need –”

“You’re always fuckin sayin you don’t need anyone lookin out for you which is a damn dirty lie and you know it, Moony. You can’t tell how bad your voice is gotten and you look like you ain’t eaten a square meal in goddamn years probably cause you fuckin haven’t. I don’t even wanna hear what you did to your arm.” She had advanced on him and was standing close in the garden and her voice was almost a whisper. “You gotta let someone keep a goddamn eye on you or you’re gonna die. You’re already hurtling that goddamn way and I want you around to meet this fuckin kid.”

Never had he thought a woman would trust him around her goddamn infant. Even thinking she wanted him to have the barest minimum responsibility made something flower in his gut like pure joy or nervousness. Then he thought on it for a second and everything drained out except the profound anxiety. “Lily why the fuck did you come down here pregnant.”

“Ain’t no safer or unsafer than Genoa,” she said. “Got a bunch of rowdy fuckers up there thinkin it’s theirs.”

“How d’you even know it’s James’s?”

“Cause I goddamn know,” she said, “a woman’s got ways, you shit.” She cast her eyes around at the flowers that had bloomed in the cool damp of the night and she crouched to pick one which she tucked into Remus’s top buttonhole. “Weren’t about to camp out in that damn whorehouse the rest of my life and it seemed as good an opportunity as any.” They walked toward the door with Lily’s callused white hand tucked against Remus’s elbow. She said “Listen I took you out here to make you promise me one thing.”

“What’s that.”

“You’re an impressive damn survivor and come time I might need you to exercise that for me.” She pointedly was not looking at him and instead scanning the creeping beds of desert sage overgrown about the brick. “If anything happens to me or James you better goddamn raise this kid. And if you can’t for whatever reason or another I got a sister Petunia up in Seattle. Just gonna put all that on the table for your consideration.” She crouched again and a breeze stirred her red hair and she rose with another little white flower which she pressed into Remus’s hand. She smiled and in the smile was no fear though he himself was sure it was writ large all over his face, the fear and shock, the impossibility. “Give this one to Sirius,” Lily said.

In the hallway outside the room she was sharing with James Lily kissed him on the cheek and slipped inside into the darkness. Remus walked down the hall hoping at the end of it inside their room Sirius would be waiting up for him listening for his boots on the hardwood. There was a little dim light that spilled out onto the floor cast by the lantern and Sirius was lying on the bed in the golden bath of it, staring at the ceiling, arms crossed over his chest as though in state. “She give you hell,” he said, pointedly not looking at Remus.

“Yessir.” Hell and else besides, he thought. He tucked the flower she had given him under Sirius’s thumb, against his chest, then he reached for the brown chemist bottle of his drops on the nightstand. There were maybe a week’s worth left if that and he knew at the bottom of it there’d be trouble of whatever variety but it was best not to think about it now. Sirius watched him eyedropper a bit on his tongue, eyes very still; he was spinning Lily’s flower between his fingers and the petals were already wilting. “It makes perfect damn sense to be fearful about your folks,” Remus said, already unable to curb his damn tongue. “I know they did – well I know.” He didn’t know how to say it so he just grabbed Sirius’s top arm, the one that bore the half-circle tattoo and the burn scar; he could feel it under his own fingers, the way the skin was different. His father hadn’t done a thing like that to him; it was more the drunken neglect that had stung hard enough to drive him out in the end. It took nearly all the energy he could muster to focus hard enough looking Sirius in the eyes and in the back of him he felt the current of his consciousness pulling off. “I know it don’t count for much but they’ll have to get through me if they have any ideas.”

“They likely could,” said Sirius coldly, looking away.

“You ain’t seen me in a real fight. I know I don’t – well I’ll be – when we go – I won’t – ”

Everything was fading off into the soft consuming pleasure of it like being swallowed underwater or by mud. At the bottom of it the hungry thing caught him and curled up, still. The light shifted, night spread out; he was still talking, or someone else was, very far away. It was rumbling inside the earth and Remus thought of riding, perhaps age thirteen, a long way across the Mexican desert toward the gulf and the fanning delta of the Colorado and camping at night on a vast plain with the mud having corniced and cracked in the heat of the day and pressing his ear to the ground hearing there the heartbeat inside the world.

 --

In the morning in the stateroom over breakfast Dumbledore said, “I do believe, Miss Evans, you have the right of it. Whatever we can do at this point certainly involves that letter.”

Next to him Sirius snuffed hard through his nose like a horse. Remus had been the subject of a breed of conniving not unlike Dumbledore’s for most of his life and almost groaned aloud. The silence stretched like a cloud on the horizon and finally he said, because no one else seemed to have the damn guts to, “Me and Sirius can ride on down there within two days.”

“Can’t have you two goin on down there on your lonesome,” said James, hopelessly. Across the room Snape was fidgeting in something troublingly like satisfaction, yellow teeth worrying at his lips to keep from smiling.

“Ain’t gonna work,” said Sirius, either expertly feigning calm or so far past anger that he no longer cared. “Gotta be Moony and me alone. That’s the letter, that’s it.” He stood and would have been the picture of selfless cowboy bravery except Remus probably alone saw his left hand trembling before he stuck it in his pocket. “You don’t hear from us in a week I expect the cavalry ridin on down to Coyame else you’ll have two very familiar ghosts hauntin you the rest of your damn days.” Likely you will anyway, Remus almost said.

“Does no one else have any thoughts or suggestions?” This from Dumbledore, attempting magnanimousness.

“Clearly no,” said Remus, trying for his pleasantest smile. “Death trip just about the only option, sir.” James affixed Dumbledore then Sirius and then Remus in turn with a pleading expression to no avail. “We’ll head on and saddle up then.” He had known this would happen since sitting across from Greyback watching him write out that damn letter. Of course it was the only way. Of course it was now – of course, after they had had four days. In the hungry part of him he felt the familiar yearning for the drug and a strange urge to embrace Sirius in front of everyone and another strange urge to smack Dumbledore and Snape across their smug faces with the flat of his gun. Instead he rose with his knees cracking and pushed Sirius by the elbow and they went out through the double doors into the hallway and walked briskly and unspeaking upstairs to put together their belongings.

Remus shut the door behind them and looked up when Sirius turned to him silhouetted in the bright morning light through the window looking like a saint from stained glass and also as though he would advance into one of his celebrated diatribes. Before he could even open his mouth Remus did: “We ain’t gonna die.”

Sirius sort of deflated. “No?”

“No.” He was aware perhaps it sounded crazy. He had taken his drops just before they had gone downstairs to the meeting and everything felt shuffled. He was sure in some corner of his brain everything had already happened because he thought he remembered riding together, days from now, still whole. And besides, how could they die after what they had already lived? “Ain’t too good at doling out comforts so that’s the best you’re gonna get,” Remus said. His own voice sounded far away and he remembered what Lily had told him.

They turned their backs to one another to pack and Sirius whispered harshly, “When we ever gonna get another time like this.”

“When we ride on back here in a week you daft motherfucker and they spend another lengthy period deliberating.” Remus sat on the bed they hadn’t slept in and set about loading his sixgun. “Plan on my needing a bath,” he said, feeling crazy, watching the distorted reflection in the metal, Sirius’s long back in his cotton shirt, “the evening we ride back in. Mull that around in your brain’s single track for a goddamn minute.” Sirius turned with his eyebrow raised and Remus knew he had won somehow considering he knew only the barest minimum rules of the damn game. “I suggest whenever you worry you’re gonna die you just remember that.”

They went downstairs with their saddlebags and found James and Dumbledore waiting in the hall. Lily was there also, as was Snape, leaning against the wall and inspecting cattle shit on his boot. Remus wished he remembered having shot him. Sirius just kept walking and they all followed. “Would make do to scout around and see the kinda landscape for a stand, “Remus told James, “just in case, I mean – try East of here considering the hills. Don’t, and I mean, whatever you do, don’t get stuck up against the Rio Grande…” He could feel eyes on his back. Perhaps they were all watching from their windows. “And right, like he said, if you don’t hear from us in a week you’d actually better on just hightail it out considerin we’ll be dead or worse and y’all up next on the damn list.”

At the stable door James hugged them both and Lily kissed their cheeks and Dumbledore shook their hands, and Snape spat in the dust.

\-- 

They rode without speaking South-Southwest as the sun passed overhead in the widening, bleached blue of the sky. They kept to the Western mountains and rode along the river where they camped that night. Remus did not sleep and wasn’t sure Sirius did either. He had never known the names of the stars but he made up stories about them until they wheeled off into the dawn and he got to his feet when Sirius did. In the night the horses had stripped the low cottonwoods and they snorted and went white-eyed when they crossed the river, feeling the strength of the current as though it signified another. Perhaps it did; they were in Mexico. They filled their canteens and rode on and stopped for a break at midday in the shadow of a misshapen mesa, at the base of which long ago some kind of structure had been erected with sunbleached boards against the merciless sun. It was painted all over with the skull and snakes of the Death Eaters but still they ate a small meal there and Remus took a few more drops just to unfocus the vastness of the boredom and fear inside him and again Sirius near on had to tie him to his pony. The color sharpened around him palpably by several degrees and the sky seemed to bleed a whitened dust violet down into the distant hills. He remembered as a child this was what he’d thought he’d walked out of to have made him so hungry. It was in the way the devouring eyes of it fixed him like a carrion bird’s, waiting and waiting til it knew he would drop. Still then and always he’d kept on walking in it seeking as always to outlast the fervor of his own deathwish.

He’d come nearly all the way out of it by goldenhour when they rode down into the town of Coyame on the old potholed road, creased as it was with years’ worth of wagontreads. The mountains around made the burning sunset sky look like someone had torn a piece of it off jaggedly around the horizon. The nested adobe cluster of the square had been built perhaps centuries previous around a stone well and a church just beyond it whose door yawned open off the hinges bearing within itself a liquid darkness. Remus knew inside it would be like many desert churches in these borderlands stripped of its fine and holy golden accoutrements by years of raids. As a child in Tennessee in the years when his father could still rise from his bed they had gone to church together in a squat and boarded dark building along a babbling river in Johnson City. Inside it reeked of incense and the mass was delivered in a creaking drone of Latin. Afterwards his father would speak with the townspeople and he would crouch by the brook watching at the small fish that moved quickly amongst the mossy stones. It was a different kind of God in that world than in this one, and now there was no God, or perhaps a different God. There was a truer God, Remus thought, in the desert, in the darkness and the stillness in the chamber – there was a truer God perhaps in nothing. And the evidence: he had never thought God could see him but he knew with certainty that the desert could.

The town looked much as it must have five hundred years ago except the eaves of the darkened houses were painted with the skull and snakes and the adobe was chipping in rounds where it had been bullet-struck likely in siege when Riddle’s legions had taken the region however long previous. A dog crossed the street hunched low in sight of something and disappeared again into shadow. In the whole spreading tableau of it Remus could hear only the sounds of the ponies’ hooves hocketing against the sunbaked ground and distantly a single bird, screaming the news of their arrival to whomever would listen. Long ago he had ridden into other desert towns like this just about as high and accompanied by other emissaries of Greyback’s to sell crates of homemade mezcal and trade for opium. Sometimes they would get the full flowers inside grainbarrels packed tightly with the redness of them just fading and once or twice salesmen had brought the fresh bulbs and sliced them across the round fleshy pod so the juice of it would flow.

Down in the square he thought he could feel eyes from the windows but if there were faces they were not visible from within the darkness. Outside one establishment there were horses tied up and light was pouring out from the windows and into long spreading shadows in the street; they rode up and dismounted. While they were tying the ponies up Sirius pressed Remus’s back between his shoulderblades with a careful clammy palm just for a second then pulled his hand away. There was warmth in it despite the fearful clamminess and the sense Sirius was trying to communicate something desperately which was perhaps just the fact of his presence – he had never been good at communicating these things aloud. Over the mountains to the East there was a vulture or something with a wide lightsucking black wingspan circling awaiting a corpse in the streets on which to feed and perhaps it would be one of theirs. It would be in keeping with his nature to be eaten by birds, he thought, and he climbed the stairs, hearing Sirius half a step behind by the jangle of his spurs.

Inside it was burning with at least a hundred oil lamps vivid amidst the eaves like stars and the silence twisted inside out even as every sallow face inside turned to the door. Remus was still high enough the light itched and the silence worse. They sat to a table in the back across from one another with Sirius’s eyes unblinking on the door, squinting in the lamplight. Under the table Remus touched the toe of his boot to Sirius’s and the bartender brought them a bottle of Greyback’s mezcal and two fingerprinted glasses, one of which was stained with blood about the cracked rim. The base of it was thick enough possibly it’d crack a skull, Remus thought. “This you can drink,” he whispered, sniffing the stuff, and Sirius fought his face into a smile. “We better settle in and wait.” The sunset leached in a pale pink through the high and glassless adobe windows and moved across the floor. By the time it was nearly gone a band was setting up in the front corner; Remus had not seen them come in. There was a man with a violin and a man with a guitar and a man with an upright bass and a woman wearing a red dress. They broke into a song that sounded very loud in the still bright room and no one watched them even as the woman swung her skirt and snapped her fingers and the sound, low and sultry, filled the air like smoke. She was singing about the heaviness of her head in a soaring soprano that wavered vulnerably when she held it. For a second Remus thought, I should ask Sirius for a dance. They’d probably be shot before they could be two steps in but it was a dancing kind of music, not that he had ever danced with anyone in his memory. He could almost see inside his head what it would be like if they could dance together – the song seemed to go on and on and before it ended Remus had refreshed their drinks twice. He knew sooner or later someone would come on in and not recognize them and it would be the time of the judgment; that was how it had always worked. Still waiting for it didn’t get any damn easier.

Past dark the premises had filled up a little but still no one dared a sound aside from the band and Sirius who was tapping his fingers to the rhythm of it against the table. They had quit to tune up their instruments and it was then that Remus watched Sirius’s face change upon sight of the woman in the door. When he turned to see her he felt a crackle of her presence like distant lightning – she was in a long silken black dress fitted tightly down to her ankles and she wore red heels and her lips and nails were painted red and her hair was black and wild, her face brutally sharp around and scarred down over the eye in a straight clean ridge. The band began playing again, seeing her, as though she had asked for entrance music. She went to the bar and without asking was brought a cup of mezcal with a red, segmented maguey worm sinking slowly to the bottom and magnified grotesquely in it and then she came right over as if invited and sat directly next to Remus on the edge of his chair, long legs crossing at the knee beneath her skirt, the points of her heels knifelike. No warmth rose off from her body but a smell like burning charcoal did and her skin was paler even than Remus’s own and unmarked by any fault except the scar. Perhaps she was six feet in height but thin and spidery as a dead cottonwood. With two long and bloodylooking nails she reached into her mezcal and pulled the worm out and bit it in half; her throat moved as she swallowed and when her lips parted again Remus could see a smear of guts on her tongue. Remus had eaten his fair share of maguey worms in his life but it made Sirius look a little green. “You look like the Blacks’ oldest,” she said to him, her voice like a rasp of snake over stone, her accent foreign – French, Remus placed, with something else in it. Perhaps she was from Louisiana – he had met a few Cajun in his day – but she did not look like she was from this earth at all. 

“Yes ma’am,” Sirius told her. God, Sirius was good. He sounded like he did when he was talking to James, except his boot pressed just tighter against Remus’s under the table. He feared perhaps she would see. Over their drinks Sirius passed her the letter; she accepted it in one clawlike white hand and studied the seal.

“Seen Regulus around here not the other day,” said the woman as though she were talking about the weather. One long white finger split the seal and she unrolled the sheaf against the table holding it open with her nails like daggers.

“How’s he holdin up.”

“He looked well,” said the woman, her red mouth lilting upwards as she read. “Said he joined some peyote church far down – South of Chihuahua City. Likely wouldn’t care for your visiting seeing as he’s like to be on some astral plane for the foreseeable future.” She smiled up at Sirius and then turned to Remus and her smile was bitter as laudanum. “Anyway Mr. Black, Mr. Lupin, it’ll trouble you gentlemen to know our dear mutual acquaintance Fenrir Greyback is dead.” 

“Ain’t all that troublin in fact,” said Remus, and the woman turned the bitter smile in his direction.

“With that kinda bounty it were a matter of time,” said Sirius.

“Indeed,” the woman said. “Ain’t no trouble to me as I can barely stomach his damn mezcal.” Still she downed the second half of the worm and the full glass in a single impressive swig. “Wanna tell me about this deal you got.”

“We were hopin to talk to Mr. Riddle about it,” Remus told her, knowing full well she’d refuse.

“No one talks to Mr. Riddle until they talk to me, Mr. Lupin, not even Jeff Davis himself.” She offered her bony hand to each of them in turn and he saw she wore a golden ring inset with a vibrant and opaque green stone carved with the skull and snakes. “Bellatrix Lestrange.”

It was like shaking hands with Santa Muerte. Sirius refreshed each of their glasses. “Miss Lestrange,” he said, “The short of it is we got a product and we need a distributor.”

“Pure morphine,” Remus explained, “powder, battlefield grade, off the Union supply trains.” One of her eyebrows disappeared upwards into her hair. “Whisper of it’ll knock you out a good stretch. I can say from experience.” He took the vial from his pocket and shifted it into her open hand under the table.

“Color me shocked you ain’t eaten this all up yourself,” she said, her laugh like something metal shredding, inspecting the contents of the vial in the brightness of the oil lamps. He wondered if she would ask him to dose it and of course there was the part of him that wanted to desperately. He was already up enough it’d for sure put him out and Sirius would have to carry him to their horses like a bride to the altar.

“Thieving’s taken care of,” said Sirius, “We need a seller in Mexico and that’s where we hoped y’all would come in. I’m sure you got your varied clientele of doctors and hopheads.”

Bellatrix tapped a bit of the powder out against the table and tasted some scooped beneath her smallest fingernail with just the slightest point of her reptilian tongue. Half the bar was watching with a familiar breed of hunger and Remus thought perhaps the band was playing faster on account of it. “Smarter than your brother, Black,” she said, swallowing. “And you, Lupin, smarter than any of Greyback’s boys I’ve yet met, namely cause you had the good sense to get gone.” She capped the vial up again and tapped it arrhythmically against the table. “Still I find in this territory whenever you see someone got a scar on their face it’s on account of their untrustworthy nature. Speaking for myself as well as you, kid,” she qualified, laying one cold hand over Remus’s on the table. “I gotta be damn sure I can trust you both ‘fore we really can do business, don’t I?” Her thumb passed gently over and over his knuckles and Sirius watched the movement of it from across the table with a jealous trepidation. “I need y’all to set a deal up on your lonesome and if Mr. Riddle and I like what we see we’ll be in touch.”

“Alright,” Sirius told her, “any other stipulations?”

She bristled a little but possibly only Remus could tell because her hand was still tightly clasped over his own. “You might want to be in touch with your folks, Mr. Black,” she said with the same bitter smile.

“Any particular place or date for the trade off,” Remus asked.

“Anything that moves down here Mr. Lupin let me tell you we know about it.” She stood and her hand drifted like a ghost across his shoulderblades. “Every damn strike of lightning I know about. Two handsome boys and a barrel of morphine I’ll damn sure know about.” She gave them another cold grin and clasped each of their hands. “Gentlemen.” Then she turned and slipped again out the door into the evening and the faces of the men in the bar turned mechanically back to their drinks.

It wasn’t until he stood up that he felt lightheaded stoned feeling of the mezcal and when he went out behind Sirius into the night he stood on the stoop for too long watching a star falling into the East. Across the square the searing light from inside the saloon spilled out like water casting against Sirius’s face and the flanks of the horses and the wild dogs scrapping about the base of the well. Far away across the world coyotes yapped and a wolf howled and the moon sat high above it and pulling itself narrower between the spires of the church. For a moment Remus thought about God again, but then Sirius called, “Are you ready?”

They rode out along the trace of the falling star and made camp at the base of a mesa a few miles out on the desert. By the light of the moon they sat close together against the night chill and ate what remained of their bread and jerky and took turns sleeping. When the dawn came Remus woke with his complete soul screaming for a dose to feel Sirius again sitting beside him smoothing his hair behind his ear. I could just lie here, he thought, feigning sleep, until the drops ran out, or until I died. Whichever came first. But when he opened his eyes he saw Sirius was watching the sun lift from the desert into the world and he had this look on his face Remus had never seen. It was beyond fear and beyond anger and stretched into a deep and chilling resignation. Something changed in it when he saw Remus was awake – it was not quite relief, but it was almost. It was, at least you are here with me. Then he stood and Remus’s side against which he’d been sitting felt very cold. “We oughta ride to Comstock.”


	8. VIII.

VIII.

the Road to Comstock – Regulus – Other Options – Terlingua and Study Butte – An Unknown Legion – Comstock – the Black Estate – Mrs. Black’s Study – Changeling – An Agreement – Wildflowers – How This Works – Beholden – Return to Van Horn – Remus’s Decision

 

“Didn’t know you had a brother,” Remus called from behind him. It was a few hours past dawn and they were riding due Easterly following the wavering needle of Sirius’s old compass toward the dip of Texan territory; on the road to Comstock they would cross the Rio Grande just before and again just after its swooping bend. In that time they would cross the Chihuahuan Desert, where they rode now across plains overgrown with mesquite and creosote, and they would ride over the high plateau of the Trans-Pecos, and they would have to do it all under the nose of the Comanche and the Confederates. Before four days’ time they’d have to find a post settled enough to get a telegram off to James to tell him they still drew breath. Sirius knew he himself had enough water left for another day and wasn’t sure how much Remus had, and he also wasn’t sure how many more days’ worth of drops Remus had; both worried him, as did the drooping appearance of the ponies. He knew they were tough animals and could survive a while even on the thin desert foliage but they desperately needed water. In short he had not been thinking about his brother. He rarely thought about his brother, whom he had not seen now going on seven years, since the dawn of his forays from home culminating with the night his mother had upended a pot of boiling water over his arm. Regulus had been sent to military school in Alabama as had apparently befit all the Black men throughout the family history aside from Sirius, a fact of which his parents had seen fit to remind him at all possible junctures. Sirius had not been surprised by Bellatrix’s announcement that Regulus had joined a peyote church, nor by the fact that she’d known his name in the first place. Perhaps he would find Regulus’s personality somewhat more palatable now that he was likely to be tripping like hell every damn minute. “Never tried peyote,” Remus called up; he was hardly one to initiate conversation and it was charming to think he of all people was trying to help Sirius out by distracting him. “Always kinda wanted to. Damn nervous about it though if I can tell you. Worried about what I’d see.” When he turned he saw Remus had pulled his pony up close. His hands and wrists were sunburnt up to the torn cuffs of his shirtsleeves and even the red cut in his arm was whitening into new skin. “We don’t have to go see your folks,” he said with an attempt at gentleness when Sirius caught his eyes. “We could try and find somebody else.”

“Do you know anybody else?”

“A few from real long ago if they’re still alive.” He spat in the dust. “Might be worth investigatin.”

“She mentioned my folks though.”

“She mentioned also she’d know if damn lightning struck or whatever,” Remus said, “it don’t matter so if you really can’t bring yourself to do it we don’t have to.” Some sick part of him thought it almost wanted to just to see if they were different or to prove they were the same. He had thought he had forsaken all desire for their approval or even their love anymore but perhaps he had not. It was the same old gnawing feeling chewing in his gut; it hurt but in the pain was a narcotic self-pity. Perhaps the whole thing did not make him all that different from Remus.

When they stopped to eat a midday meal Sirius watched Remus rummage through his bag in search of the thin brown glass bottle of his drops. He had quit hiding from Sirius to take them. When he pulled the bottle out he inspected the level of liquid within, looking abstractly concerned. Sirius stopped him with a question before he could unscrew the lid. “Would you go back to see your dad if you could.”

“Expect he’s dead,” Remus said, drumming his nails against the glass. “Or as good as. Regardless he wouldn’t hardly be with it enough to know me.”

Sirius knew his parents would know him. “But if you knew he’d be alive and would know you would you go back.”

Remus opened the bottle and busied himself measuring his dose with the eyedropper, brow furrowed tightly, eyes focused. Somehow he looked hungrier than he had seconds ago, like his skin had drawn closer to his bones just with the smell of it. “I never even think about it,” he said finally, fixing Sirius for just a split second, “because there’s no way.”

 --

In the tiny and besieged settlement at Terlingua they ate an evening meal and sent this telegram to Van Horn: JAMES ET AL STOP PLANS HAVE CHANGED STOP NOW EN ROUTE TO COMSTOCK TEXAS STOP LOOK TO OUR RETURN AND EXPLANATION IN ANOTHER WEEK END

They camped that night on the desert on the East flank of Study Butte without a fire on account of the violent heat. It was so midsummer the warmth didn’t even suck down out of the day when the sun left the world. The moon cast the formation at their backs steeply in shadow and they heard the sounds of the desert echoing against it, coyotes yipping and distant wolves and the calls of the night birds slipping against the stone. Sleepily Remus asked him about the names of the stars and Sirius pointed out the one after which he had been named, and Regulus, but by then Remus had fallen asleep on his arm.

\-- 

They rode into the dawn along the old Camino Real and then across the Rio Grande once more and into the state of Coahuila where they followed the arrow of Sirius’ compass again roughly Easterly. The desert there was very flat and the sand a pale white, distant mountains bleaching in the haze against the spreading blue sky. They saw not a single fellow rider for the complete day until sunset when Sirius caught sight of a plume of kicked-up dust blowing out of the North and when they both pressed ear to the ground they could hear the hoofbeats of riders. They and their horses lay down in a dry wash still but for the flanks heaving – seemingly even the ponies knew if it was Comanche they were all done for – but the column bent off to the West and the dust followed. Still they lay until the sound had gone and the plume dispersed. “Could be Confederate,” Sirius whispered. “Perhaps a Mexican legion after Cochise or perhaps scalphunters.” 

Remus’s eyes shifted his way and Sirius knew he was approaching relative lucidity. They both knew Apache would’ve gutted them or worse and Confederates would have bound them and brought them North. Near Austin, Sirius had heard tell, they had been executing Unionists now for years. A Mexican legion would likely ride on with tips of their hats en route to Arizona and scalphunters would either leave them well enough alone or scalp them both for the Sonoran bounty depending on who was in command.

At night they camped again without a fire and just before the meridian of the day following they rode across the Rio Grande just before it widened into Lake Amistad. The horses drank thoroughly at the bank and Sirius and Remus shaved their faces and filled their canteens and rolled cigarettes perhaps in attempt solely to prolong the inevitable. The complete vast floodplain of that landscape was flat and featureless into the distance apart from the sparse mesquite and Sirius remembered it from his youth, the sense of being unable to hide from the sun’s blazing eye. Even at night the moon seemed to have just replaced it. When they got to be a little older he and Regulus would climb into Seminole Canyon and swim in the river’s eddying offshoot and inspect the old Indian paintings on the steep rock walls there slicked smooth as paper when the river withdrew. Once he had told Regulus they were all painted in children’s blood and they had never gone back to that place. Distantly across the plain he could see the round black smudges of cattle grazing and wondered if they were his parents’. He would have been able to tell up close from the key-shaped brand on the left flank.

With breakfast Remus had taken his dose but he withheld completely at their midday meal and thus he was very quiet. He held his pony’s reins so tightly his knuckles were white as bleached bone. “This where you came up?” he asked. There was a tight edge in his voice and Sirius knew he was speaking only to keep each of their minds off the respective pressing matters.

“Believe it or not.”

“I do believe it.” Remus cast his eyes about. They were coming into town; he could just see it a smudge in the haze to the East. “Everyplace puts a damn brand on ya.”

“What kinda brand’s on me?”

Remus couldn’t answer or didn’t want to. Certainly his own were a good deal more obvious.

“My family’s owned all the land to the South right up to the border since the day the war ended,” Sirius told him to break the silence. “They ain’t never had any kind of allegiance to one nation or another, it don’t suit ‘em. They ain’t never trusted no government of no kind let alone one gonna see fit to tell ‘em what to do in any regard. God forbid it should tell ‘em, perhaps you shouldn’t own people.”

He was getting vitriolic and his voice louder by increments and Remus shushed him with a pained and lopsided grin. “Remember they’ll kill Unionists in Texas, you Yankee scum.”

Just outside of town they took a turn Southwards beneath the wrought-iron gate bearing the rounded key brand of the Blacks hanging on chains from its center and they wound down on the loose stone road toward the lake and the lowlands and the haze smudge of Sirius’s ancestral home. When he had left the region for the final time at age fifteen he had sworn he would only come back in a pine box. He’d felt pretty damn likely it would happen that way because the arm hurt so he feared it’d kill him if not at first then perhaps later with infection. Still he rode up somehow breathing at age twenty-one to the sprawling and impossible behemoth of his family’s estate and before it he dismounted, boots yielding a plume of red dust. He heard Remus jump down beside him and whistle a little through his teeth at the sight of the place. He supposed it would indeed be shocking to someone who had never seen it before. It looked as though his folks had rebuilt a Southern plantation home in the middle of the damn desert plain because in fact they had. They had been unwilling to forfeit the trappings of Southern wealth when they relocated to Texas for more profitable dealings still. It was a massive columned structure with wide blown-glass windows and two wrapping porches upstairs and down, all painted white with the shutters a vivid forest green. The color was peeling in the relentless sand-blowing wind revealing the grey clapboards beneath and it looked like a ghost version of the house Sirius had known as a child. More cattle were visible up unto the horizon and beyond them the shimmering miragelike vastness of the lake, then the desert. Sirius crossed the brick pathway messily inlaid into the sand and climbed the buckling stairs up to the porch, Remus following, the floorboards creaking beneath their weight, and he lifted the heavy silver serpent door knocker and pounded twice. He thought his heart would leave his body but somehow when he heard footsteps inside it settled. Everything smoothed out calm like the flat of the desert around and he breathed in, deeply, the dry and salty taste of the air, like the wind and the cattle shit and the horses and the sweat, and the locks clicked inside the door echoing through his consciousness like gunshots, and the door swung open upon his mother’s face.

 --

In the stifling sitting room a slave girl brought them lukewarm tea and stale biscuits without speaking or lifting her eyes. Sirius’s mother sat in her tall green velvet armchair, the fabric fraying where she worried at it with her long fingernails. She wore the same collection of ancient golden rings inlaid with precious stones and her clothing was pristine and stylish as ever, no doubt ordered from the Eastern catalogues, but her eyes seemed to have finally fully died inside her white face. He sat across from her in the decaying floral armchair he had taken often as a child when discussions were had about him in his silent presence and Remus stood to his left, hands folded behind his back, the same way he had once stood behind Remus while he sat in a very different chair under the duress of memory similarly as dire. There was movement upstairs, creaking heavily in the floorboards, and none looked up. The girl had lit a few oil lanterns about the room and the thick curtains were closed so tightly it might well have been night outside.

“What brings you here,” said Sirius’s mother. It was the first she had spoken. He thought he saw Remus flinch, just in the mouth, at the sound of her voice, like funeral bells. “And who’s this.”

“I need help,” he said, the words tasting horrible; he watched the loose velvet skin of his mother’s face stretch into a frozen smile like that upon a death mask. “Likely there’s good money in it for the both of us. And this is my associate Remus Lupin out of Carter County Tennessee.”

“Ma’am,” Remus said, bowing his head.

Sirius’s mother cast her black marble eyes over him in disappointed appraisal. “You’re strung out as all fuck, Remus Lupin.”

Remus tensed but couldn’t be bothered lying and Sirius felt a surge of something like pride. “Yes ma’am.”

“You can take your damn drops in front of me. Don’t know what my apparent progeny might’ve mentioned but I’m certainly not one to judge on that account.” She fixed Sirius; it had been a long time since he’d felt dissected in that look. “A man can do what he likes.”

“Gonna hold out lucid for our conversation, ma’am,” Remus said, somewhere, in the real world that was still happening behind the black universe inside his mother staring and the knife that split upwards through his belly and flayed his skin open and in it the sun’s vivid eye.

“What do you two want,” she said, and she looked away finally.

“We got a product we need to get over the border,” Sirius explained, and something changed in her face.

“Thought you weren’t one for this business, Sirius.” It was odd to hear her say his name. “Thought you wound up on the side of the law.”

How she’d laugh if she heard he wound up on a very different side of the law entirely than she was envisioning. “Didn’t last very long,” he said, swallowing bile. “Felt the siren call.”

“Money?”

“Just about.”

She looked at Remus and then at Sirius as though she could discern something and perhaps she could. “Doubted for years you were really my son,” she said.

“Ain’t surprised to hear it.”

“Thought they’d replaced my real boy with a changeling.”

“Well it ain’t so.” The footsteps sounded again upstairs. “Is that father?”

“No,” she said. The silence spread out beyond the muted whispers in the kitchen. “What kind of product do we speak about.”

“Pure morphine,” said Remus, for the nth time, and Sirius knew it was probably the sweetest torture to say it, “Battlefield grade, off the Union shipments.”

Her thin eyebrows shifted. “Hell of a deal.”

“Yes ma’am,” said Remus.

“Know any takers?”

In the silence one of the oil lamps flickered and went out. “Might very well,” said Sirius’s mother. “I hope you’re too smart to have it all with you.”

“Just a vial of the stuff if you wanna – um, gauge the quality.”

“I’m quite sure Mr. Lupin’s already gauged the goddamn quality, Sirius, no? What else’d be the point in consorting with a goddamn hophead anyway, I may ask.” Remus had flushed but somehow managed to keep his mildest smile on. “You oughta learn these damn rules, boy,” said Sirius’s mother, pointing with a single accusatory finger. The skin seemed to melt from it like white wax. This he was accustomed to. He bit his tongue, hard. “How much you got?”

“However much you could get across,” Remus said. Her eyes fixed him and Sirius was tempted to dive in front as though shielding him from a damn bullet. “Ain’t in no real rush to get rid of it.”

“You done this before, then.”

“Many times ma’am.” Remus cleared his throat. His eyes were bright and liquid inside his pale face and Sirius knew his mother also understood what that meant. “Wanted to get this deal through the best.”

“Don’t flatter me,” she said sharply, then added, for good measure, “scum.” She stood from the chair and smoothed her deep green skirts. She looked as though she had not seen sun for years and her advancement upon them was like out of the tomb. Sirius knew he recoiled into his chair but likely Remus stood firm. “I’d hoped you’d make better friends, Sirius,” she said, reaching one bony hand out in their direction. She’ll ask for my soul, Sirius thought, a vivid flash. Instead she said, beckoning, “The vial, Mr. Lupin.”

They negotiated that on the Fifth of August they would bring two barrels of the powdered morphine to Comstock and ride with associates of the Black family through the ancestral property Southwards into Coahuila to a town called El Pensamiento, where they would make a deal. “In return, son of mine,” she said, cold smile spreading the skin across her face like mold upon cheese, “I think you will owe me a favor.”

 --

They rode again to the Northwest into the stretching goldness of the afternoon and when the sun was just touching on the horizon they rode through a field of desert wildflowers bursting in vivid color they would hold for only a few days. The rain must have passed in the night previous just over a narrow strip of the borderland. The wildflowers were bright oranges and pinks and dusky blues but Sirius could hardly even see them such was his vision blurred with anger. Someone was saying his name and perhaps it was his mother’s voice from the past but suddenly it was Remus, who had ridden up close and stayed his horse by the bridle. He had taken his drops on horseback just after they had ridden out of Comstock and perhaps on account of it the expression on his face was hardly readable, or Sirius was just too scattered. He dismounted and crouched to hobble his pony and Sirius did the same and as soon as he stood straight again Remus grabbed him by the shirtcollar. There was a whump of pollen and the air left him and he was flat on his back in the flowers looking up into the merciless cloudless blueness of the spreading sky and Remus was sucking on his neck, inside his shirt so all them wouldn’t see in the study in the hotel in Van Horn. “You’re a good man,” Remus said clearly, fixing Sirius in the eyes, holding him down by the shoulders. “You’re a good man. You’re my good man.” He could have wept hearing it and almost did when Remus tucked a stray lock of his hair behind his ear. The very nervous wild animal Sirius suspected to be Remus’s very soul was inside his eyes looking out through the haze of things. “You ain’t nothin like her. You’re worth all your family put together. At least to me.”

There was a blaze of pollen across his cheekbone beneath the scar and Sirius thumbed it away; when he did Remus leant his whole head into the touch like a cat. He bent to kiss Sirius on the mouth and their teeth clashed, he bit Sirius’s lip, hard enough he tasted blood. This was how it had been as things developed, both of them jockeying for dominance, but this time Remus just went when Sirius flipped him. He wasn’t one to look a gift horse in the damn mouth; the hopelessness was draining from the world and it was filling with a soft golden mist. Remus’s boots went first; they were terrible and peeling to pieces, he had stepped in horse shit. In the flowers around they landed with muted thumps. Then his jeans, torn at the knees, and his white shirt, bloody at the collar where he had cut his jaw shaving just that morning crouching beside the Rio Grande; he lifted his arms obediently so Sirius could get it off. The little blood spot bloomed just beneath his ear and Sirius licked it clean. The flowers were fragrant where they had crushed and left smears of color and spots of dew against skin. And the sounds of the birds, and the buzzing insects, and of Remus’s tiny bitten-off moan, when Sirius nipped at the joint of his neck and shoulder. When he caught Remus’s eyes they were blown out like they got, red with the pollen, his mouth was open, hair a mess. “I wouldn’t let you touch me if you weren’t good,” he said, breathless, in Sirius’ ear. Sirius realized then he was trying to convince himself first above all; his every muscle was tense, taut, thrumming like he was waiting for a fight. “You can do anything,” Remus said, lips wet against Sirius’s jaw, clammy fingers pulling Sirius’s shirt out of his jeans, skimming up his back, along the ridges of his spine, “I want – you can have me – ” He lifted the heart off from around Sirius’s neck and pressed his hand against Sirius’s real heart inside his shirt which was pounding seemingly at the speed of sound. Perhaps it was just the echo of his own but he thought he could hear Remus’s heartbeat or perhaps it was the horses stamping or perhaps it was thunder far away or perhaps it was puzzle pieces moving inside the world. Even as their lips brushed in the closeness Sirius understood in the face of all this it would not in fact be having with any sort of permanence. Nothing could be had and kept let alone something this flighty – another little animal like himself howling at nothingness. The flowers around would be dead within days. “Hurry up,” said Remus, “before I change my – ”

Sirius shut him up with two fingers in his mouth. Remus’s tongue was like velvet but his chipped tooth scraped Sirius’s knuckle enough there was a little blood welling up in a bright globe when he traced his fingers in a slick trail down over Remus’s belly and between his legs. He would think a long time later about what it must have taken for Remus to offer up even this miniscule window in which he allowed himself to be without shell and otherwise undefended and for him to let another person inside him on levels literal and metaphoric but he hardly thought about it then. Instead it was like an avalanche collapsing into itself or a distant earthquake tremor; it was this cathartic action heralding a deep breath and a _finally_ , and a sense that afterwards the very substance of it would not be quite the same. Perhaps it was the contrast, that two hours ago he had been sitting in the floral armchair in his parents’ sitting room feeling as though he were drowning in the inevitability of his own fate and now – perhaps this was the most complete control he would have over another person and certainly it was the most complete control he would ever have over Remus, who went where he was moved like he was part rag doll and whose knee was presently over Sirius’s shoulder and who would not quit looking him directly in the eyes. He was breathing like there was something delicate as spun sugar about to break inside the world and when he could muster the focus for it he would say something scattered against Sirius’s mouth and dissolving in the thick air between them – “I want – please – ”

He was quite certain Remus would never beg him for it again and obliged, so slowly he watched Remus’s eyes flutter back inside his head, his brow knit by degrees in concentration – he had Remus’s left hand pinned above his head like a white moth struggling and Remus’s other hand was tangled in his hair and his heel was against the small of Sirius’s back and pulling him closer. Between their frenzied and increasingly desperate kisses he was babbling the way he often did when he was violently high, almost nonsense but rhythmic, like a chant, like a spell; Christ, he was unreal, his eyes were like the seething grey of desert clouds before rain and Sirius was sure he could hear his heartbeat now, or feel it in the swallowing heat inside him, or it was thunder far away, or it was the cavalry riding up from the Southwest, and perhaps this would be better than any other way he could conceive of to die – to feel all this, and a spear thrown through both their hearts. The steep edge of something was screaming up before him and somehow in the getting there he found some slip of lightning inside Remus that made his muscles torque tightly and his breath hitch on something like words and in it he pulled Sirius’s hair, hard. The sharp pain of it lanced all the way through him and tipped something over. It was like firing a rifle across a long flat and feeling the recoil and then seconds later the sensation of the sound coming back to him in palpable waves; somewhere in the thick of it he felt Remus come, a spatter of heat on his belly, a lot of skin very close, heel pressing hard against his back. The sound he made was distanter still but Sirius heard it, a layered and gasping cacophony of breath like he was coming back alive out of stone after too long imprisoned to have remembered how to breathe, or how to speak, or how to make love – 

When all the locust roaring gave out and took his strength with it the sound of Remus’s shaky breath developed and the salty skin taste of his sweat on Sirius’s tongue. When he shifted to one side Remus’s loose open hand went with him, drifting into his hair, and he watched while Remus bent his knees up with two loud cracks and curled his toes into the crushed flowers. When he opened his eyes one by one he looked like he’d been knocked out and just come back around. There was pollen in his hair that the sun caught and his eyes were soft and heavy and he was still breathing hard and Sirius watched him as he carefully sat up, suppressing a quiet wince, and found his shirt amidst the nearby grass. Then he picked a few flowers, knotting them together by their stems until they made a circlet. “For you,” he said, still breathless. Sirius bowed his head so Remus could put it around his neck and when he looked up Remus was smiling tiredly. “You look handsome.”

“You look debauched.”

“I feel – yes. Debauched. Thank you.” He got up to find his cigarette stuff, knees a little shaky, and tugged the long hem of his shirt over his crotch, which was endearingly useless. His thighs were wet and a few crushed blue petals stuck to the back of his knee and he moved like he was in a dream. “Your mother’s horrific,” he said when he came back.

“Yessir.”

“You’re not,” he said, “you’re a good man. You’re my best friend.”

“You fuck your best friends on a regular basis?”

Remus fixed him and Sirius saw his eyes had not altogether gone back to normal. “I ain’t never had nobody like you. You likely know it.”

“Suspected as such.”

“Ain’t easy for me.” He lit the cigarette he had rolled and took a drag and passed it to Sirius, then lay down again next to him in the tall grass, closing his eyes against the setting sun. “I don’t know how this works,” he said. “Ain’t like we could be like James and Lily. Makes sense to be best friends and then this. I don’t mind it like that if you don’t.”

Sirius passed the cigarette back. “Wanna be around you near on every minute.”

“Yes,” Remus said. “That’s the thing. Ain’t quite used to that.”

“You know I – well this, this thing, it’s – without regard to anything. It would be no matter what.” Remus’s eyes flicked to his horse munching cud several yards away and to his leather saddlebags which contained – “But I will tell you I think you gotta quit. And I think you can now.”

“How’s that.”

“If my mother’ll vouch for it. Which she will. Plus now we know we’re dealing with people who aren’t in this game cause they’re hooked. They wouldn’t have you try it cause it don’t matter.”

Remus just looked at him and at the circlet of flowers round his neck and then into the Northwestern corner of the sky as if seeing the end of that desert road at the hotel in Van Horn at which they were all waiting. But they could wait a little damn longer; they would fucking have to. “Sirius,” Remus said, turning to him, knees drawn up, and Sirius thought he had never before seen Remus look like that, which was almost frightened, “what if I can’t.” And then, in an even smaller voice, “Or what if I do. And then you don’t – ” Sirius kissed him in attempt to shut him up and he thought it was the sweetest kiss they had heretofore shared, perhaps on account of there was hardly anything pressing in it. It was past need or even desire. When he pulled away even if Remus looked a little thunderstruck he still said, “I don’t even know if I’ll like me.”

“You’ll just be you,” Sirius said, “except not sick. That’s it.” There was an indent mark on the outer edge of Remus’s hip where a sheaf of grass had pressed in under his weight and Sirius traced his fingers over and over it feeling even in the lightest touch how Remus would shiver. “That’s it,” he said again. “You could be just you except beholden to no one and nothing.”

Inside of it: you could be beholden to only me. Knowing he never would, he was like the desert.

 --

Around dinnertime of the next day they rode into Van Horn and Lily was standing on the porch to greet them with her hair and the tails of her oversize white shirt, which was likely James’s, blowing Westerly like a surrender flag in the desert breeze. “Saw your dust,” she said, hurrying down the stairs to embrace them both. “Everyone’ll wanna hear what the hell happened but I know you’re like to need your rest and I came out to ask if I should cover for ya.”

“You’re an angel outta heaven Lily,” Sirius told her.

“I know, thank you.” They walked with her inside and she held to Remus’s arm at the elbow. “I’ll buy you twenty minutes,” she said when they’d ducked into the cool of the entry hall. They heard rumbles from behind the closed doors into the sitting room, a sharp voice, probably Snape’s. “Wash your damn faces. And Sirius, you oughta do up at least another button.”

They went upstairs to the room at the end of the hall and changed out of their rumpled clothes. Remus held a wet cloth over his face for what seemed a long time, elbows on his knees, long back bent in a delicate curve. He passed the cloth to Sirius then rummaged about in his saddlebags til he produced his chemist’s bottle with just the barest edge of liquid still inside and Sirius watched him measure his dose out with skilled precision and drip it on his tongue. Then he stood and slipped the bottle in his pocket. Already his eyes were different and the melting change of it was spreading through his whole body. “We’ll go down and talk to em,” he said, “we’ll tell em what needs to happen from here. Then I’m gonna go outside and pour this out.” He clinked the bottle in his pocket with his thumbnail. “I’m gonna apologize in advance for my behavior. You’re gonna want to take my gun away from me. Might take near on a week or so, I ain’t sure. Never stuck the whole thing out before.” He was wildly nervous or it was the drug slowly swallowing. Sirius wanted desperately to say something but nothing would formulate. Words, he thought, could not do this feeling justice. Perhaps there was no word for it he was brave enough to say. He took Remus by the shoulder and embraced him so tightly he could feel the drug sap the strength from the body by increments. The sunset was coming in through the window.

They went downstairs and told the tale. Dumbledore selected James and Snape to ride out come dawn to the Union outpost at Albuquerque to trade for a stockpile of powdered morphine. Both looked livid at having been assigned to a task together and Lily looked like she was holding back tears of laughter and elsewise no one spoke much. When they all turned in for the night Remus went into the garden through the French doors and Sirius followed. They walked together not speaking much into the desert hills lit up in bright watercolor shades as the sun slipped behind the rim of the world. Remus crouched and dug a hole with his hands, scooping the sand out as it ran back in thinly with a liquid sound, and Sirius turned in a circle, watching the dusk pull its soft blanket Westerly, the light slipping out of grasp like water. The vast desert land and in it the distant green mountains, the evening haze opaque and heavy, the birds emerging from the ground and the bats from the caves scattered all over beneath that territory as though they functioned to prove here particularly the earth was hollow. Remus upended the bottle and the liquid ran and he buried it all until there was no black trace of it and he stood abruptly brushing his hands off looking as though he had buried a corpse. They walked down out of the hills together quickly against the growing darkness.


	9. IX.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> another general trigger warning for the content of this chapter.

IX.

the Onset – Greyback’s Head – Delirium – Conversation in the Study – Los Enmascarados – “Leaves of Grass” – Eavesdropping – James, then Lily – Lucidity – a Different Consciousness – Sirius Asleep – Well and Truly Fucked – Breakfast – a Walk, an Apology – a Recap – a Bath – Lily Performs a Miracle

 

Just before dawn Remus woke like he’d been slapped and about ran downstairs, tripping over himself amidst the seething fog inside his brain, and stumbled across the desert garden to the jakes where he evacuated everything inside himself at once and violently. Behind the slat boards he watched at the movement of the night animals into their respective dens as the light stirred in the East. He vomited twice more before he could even stand and picked his way back across the courtyard intermittently spitting bile. It took everything in him to remain on his feet instead of crawling up the stairs and when he got to the room at the end of the hall he found Sirius was still asleep and Greyback’s head was on the opposite bed spreading blood blackly against the wool blankets, eyes still open, looking at him.

Next thing he was sitting on the floor on the room’s threshold in a puddle of puke and Sirius was pulling at his wrists saying, Moony Moony Moony, get up, come on. James was in the hall with his dark tired eyes huge in his face and Peter hovered at his shoulder, face green. They exchanged Words with Sirius. A ceramic bowl was brought, then replaced. Someone cleaned up the vomit but the smell still turned his stomach even when the morning breeze began shifting once more through the window. Occasionally he could still see the head on the opposite bed through the veil of tears. He was hardly sure why even he was crying. Perhaps he had been so far gone his body could stand nothing within it that was not of the drug. Soon it would be all his blood coming out.

 --

The desert about screaming through the window screaming, screaming, screaming. And about itself an echo of his own screaming, long ago, yesterday. Perhaps he had burnt out his whole inside with the acid.

The feeling was, there was no feeling. There was the ache and the dread yearning but inside that was hollowness. He was walking about inside his head through the rooms and there was a corpse in every bed. In the desert he was making love with Sirius long ago, yesterday. Weeks from now, beneath the white moon, crescenting like a thumbnail, and his voice was saying, “you’re my good man…” But can anyone’s goodness or belonging be quantified in this world? They rode South through a field of bones like he had as a child walked Westerly with his boots peeling apart and then his feet until at last there was no water.

His mother had grown grey roses against their cabin and they had gone wild once she passed and never borne flower again.

The memory of it was worse than all the rest combined that he had had in his own possession the very cure for his every ill and he had poured it out into the desert as though the substance of that territory needed another drug being as it in itself was the purest narcotic he had ever known. Eliciting in itself a twin compulsion perhaps stronger still and as gutting. That was the compulsion he had felt his whole life and there would be no quitting that no matter how much sick.

Someone lifted something cool to his mouth in the heat and he drank.

 --

He woke up again at night on the desert curled in a ball where he must have fallen on his way back from the jakes. Indeed his forehead was bleeding into his eyes dropping a red curtain down against the moon and the wheeling catalogue of stars. Present at the scene of my own birth, he thought; it was so vivid inside the fog it was like a knife. Perhaps a cicada passed over his leg or it was his skin crawling.

He stood, balancing, and fell again, slamming his elbow, rolled and puked again at the sudden cold shock of pain. He sat breathing waiting for himself to settle because he would not crawl. In the hotel there was a single light on in an upper window. A shadow moved in it across the ceiling.

When he could stand he picked his way across the dead garden into the foyer and dragged his fingertips against the rough wallpaper beneath the dusty portraits hung there in order to keep from falling. In the sitting room they had left the tables and chairs in their loose circle from the day’s conference and Greyback’s head was in Dumbledore’s chair spreading a black ring from itself over the blue fabric and its eyes passed over him as he came in shutting the door softly against the dim lanternlight in the hall. He sat across from the head pressing his palm against his forehead in attempt to stop it bleeding. Still the trail of it ran down to the base of his jaw and into the collar of his shirt. And the pale moonlight cast against the threadbare Oriental pattern shifting like keys across the floor.

“You in trouble, Remus?” said Greyback’s head from the chair. “You look ill.” The mouth was full of blood. He had said those words before or perhaps it was just a different sort of now. _Come and try this medicine_. Of course he had hardly at the time remembered the primary brand of delirium that had manifested just after they had done it. They had seemed to take great delight all around and they toasted one other with mezcal and burnt the blood from the knife with a flaming scrap of bone. Greyback had carried him like a small bride in rags to his chambers about the rear of the premises and laid him before the fire upon the furs and he had watched at the movement of the flames slipping into the warmth and the pleasure of it coursing like a different blood – eleven years upon this earth and at that moment delivered once more unto a different consciousness inside of which substance would not take form in the same way and the full rich blackness was the complete tapestry of the world.

Someone was pulling his hair back from his forehead but Greyback was across the room and had no hands left, anymore. Perhaps they had burnt his body or perhaps they had left it whole upon the desert for the wolves. Perhaps they had cut it all apart and worn it all as trophies.

“Open your mouth up. Come on – ” out of the past. This or the now, the parallel now. The chill crawled up through his very bones and walked across his skin upon the feet of insects. Greyback’s head spoke once more drawn in blood in the room: “It seems to me you alone believed there was need for you as an independent actor upon the stage of fate. As opposed to your former compatriots who operated then and still do if I may tell you so as one single inviolable body beneath my leadership.”

Someone was pulling his hair back from his forehead standing perhaps against the back of his chair.

“I suggest you consider the alleged fact of your independence and your goddamn free will considering there has been another very living motivator dwelling parasitic within you a decade now and desperately fighting its eviction as we speak. And I suggest you think on the kind of betrayal of which you have proven yourself capable and how very easy it was for you then and how very easy it may indeed still be. And perhaps most strongly I suggest you think on your supposed friends, Remus, and particularly on the one of them it seems you only know carnally.”

Someone – or the room perhaps, or the space of the desert, at his back, watching, appraising, from afar. Making remarks in shorthand at the office of the assayer keeping tabs on the buried value of the dead land around for the purchase thereof and the excavation.

The head smiled, blood. Blood complete in the mouth and the raggedness of the death wound.

Again, the shift, into the room, the upstairs room at the end of the hall in the dim flickering lanternlight wherein Sirius was pulling his hair back from his forehead, humming to him like a child, under his breath, nearly asleep.

 --

The light shifted over the floor and back again in the movement of the curtains and the night sent the cold down over the world and people closed the door and opened it. Someone was pulling his hair back from his forehead. He hardly knew who they were coming in the door and someone had taken his gun which was good in the end because he could have hardly focused to aim it properly if it had been necessary. Someone was reading something rhythmic aloud in a voice smooth as butter sitting on his bed leaning against the wall in the light from the lantern propped on the bedside table and under the weight the springs complained. It was a someone with knees drawn up to his chest reading out of a pretty red book perhaps taken from downstairs or perhaps picked up along the trail Southeasterly. “I have heard what the talkers were talking,” read the person, “the talk of the beginning and end, but I do not talk of the beginning or the end.” Outside it was dark and the moon through the window pulled like a tide at him, the pure and cold white light of it like a noose around his gut. Perhaps for days he had not moved and the world had gone on and on around him and whoever had been sent up and up and up again during the periods of his relative lucidity in order to read the same poem to him at differing intervals solely to drive him mad. Perhaps time had not moved at all in what had felt to him like six years and perhaps someone had thrown a glamour over the world and pulling back his hair was – but when he shifted, panicked, he saw it was only Sirius, who put the book down with his finger inside the pages to mark his place.

When Sirius leant close enough that Remus’s eyes could focus he felt his stomach drop out in horror. It was not Sirius in the bed with him and whoever had taken his skin wore it like clothing that fit badly. Inside of it they had not slept and they hungered desperately and he knew what for. “Hi there,” lied this person, “how you feelin?”

Under the rough wool blanket he was naked except for his shirt, he was realizing, and his heart seemed to skip a full beat or more just in raw screaming self-contempt that he’d been too addled for too long to realize nothing had happened and nothing had changed and it was all the same and here was another waiting until he needed something to ask for a Favor – a favor as though it were a cup of sugar and he weren’t near on sure he was gonna die.

How absurd that he had bought completely the whole construction and played along with it for however long. First deal out and him having been scarred in vengeance and sipping drops on account of it for him to meet at this very specific juncture three boys who wanted to be his friends. God and for him to have believed even fleetingly any of them wanted to be his friend at all and to have believed one of them wanted to be something like a little more perhaps in a permanent way. Of course it was a ruse and a very clever one at that and masterfully constructed. Perhaps he should have been honored someone wanted to go through all that in order to get in his goddamn trousers. Moony, he wanted to say aloud to himself, you goddamn imbecile. Tattoo it on your fuckin face. Go back East and get yourself lobotomized.

The person like Sirius reached for his shoulder and he flinched away and went for his gun but of course it wasn’t there. The book shut with a muffled sound. Remus made it half out of bed and fell on his ass and sat on the floor looking up and pushing himself away with his heels until his back was up against the far wall. On the bed the person like Sirius watched across at him looking at a complete and deeply horrified loss and Remus stared at him trying not to blink because he knew if he blinked time would shift again like it always had and he would wake up on the floor in a few hours’ time again bereft. He was watching at the person’s hands knowing they would try to pull a piece out. Or their works, perhaps, but that he could live with. He probably would have lived with anything for it to make the world go back to how it had been. Others had liked him to beg before. He had never found it very edifying but then he had hardly remembered after the fact anyway.

The person like Sirius kept watching at him and shifted slowly with his hands raised until he was sitting on the edge of the bed with his feet on the floor. Then he picked the book up again and started reading from it where he had left off. “There was never any more inception than there is now, nor any more youth or age than there is now, and will never be any more perfection than there is now, nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.”

 --

He woke up or something and it was like wading through dense marshes to the surface of it in the room filled with screaming light that chewed inside his brain. The whole bed seemed swampy with his cold sweat and he turned onto his side and listened hard into the ringing of his ears, into the hallway, where three people were speaking:

“I don’t think – it’s – well. In short he doesn’t believe that it’s us.”

“How can he not believe that it’s us?”

“I don’t know. I ain’t a doctor nor an expert on this shit. It’s like he don’t know who I am. He woulda shot me last night if he had a gun.”

“Goddamn.”

“Moral of the story is he don’t got a gun so it ain’t like he gonna do ya any harm. Just thought you should know for reference.”

“Know this must be tough on ya.”

There was a long, fraught silence. In it Remus could nearly hear the eye contact communicating the great unsaid. “It’ll pass,” said the first voice, not in fact sounding at all sure of it. “Go ahead and say hello.”

It would be easier to feign sleep, Remus decided, than to face these people, whoever they were. He shut his eyes as the door opened with a soft creak and he heard the cautious footsteps forward – three sets of them. One stayed by the door as it shut with a soft snick, two others advanced into the spilling white light and then, very tentatively, one sat on the edge of the bed. The person by the door made a sound like a wince and the person on the bed touched the sore mark on his arm very gingerly the way you would touch a wild animal. “How’s my Moony,” said the person, in James’s voice. How would a person go about getting someone else’s voice, Remus wondered. Didn’t they know James was going to be a father? How’s my Moony, the words were running and running and running around inside his head. He remembered sometimes Sirius would call him by his real name and Greyback always did… His heart was pounding a thousand miles a minute. Perhaps he would open his eyes and they would all be present. “Know you’re awake, kid,” said the James voice. “It’s just me.”

In the blinding light when he fought his eyes open the person like Sirius was sitting on the opposite bed eyeing him and the James person in turns. The one like Peter was standing on the threshold. He played Peter well in that he looked vaguely concerned but he knew he was in too deep; it was in his eyebrows. Since they’d ridden down he’d been at such a complete fucking loss – poor Peter. The real one had almost definitely not seen a lick of this coming but then Remus hadn’t either. He should never have considered himself such a stone cold outlaw if he was really so susceptible to temptation. He’d let that whole desert thing go and for what? After all it was the only thing that had ever done him any good, and he felt the thread again, the umbilical down to the wild howling thing in his belly – please – please – anything – anything –

He understood it was best to play along the most he could. “Morning,” he said. God, his voice was like the sound of death and inside him it was rattling at every loose thing.

“How you feeling,” said Peter from the door.

“Terrific.” James kind of smiled revealing a flash of his smooth white teeth and he gave Sirius a look. Remus remembered something else that had been concerning him like a punch to the solar plexus. “How’s your wife.”

“Lily’s well, Moony, she’s worried about you is all and desperately pregnant.” He squeezed Remus’s shoulder tightly, long dark fingers in contrast against the white fabric. “I could ask her to come up.”

If Lily wasn’t real or if someone was wearing her face and voice everything would have torn apart by the seams and so help him he would drag himself down to the desert and eat at the patch of sand where he’d dumped out his laudanum until something came of it. He shook his head. “No, it’s alright.”

Later he knew the Sirius person would tell the James and the Peter, did you see how he suspects? The fear in his eyes? They would remark about it until they came up with some way to fool him but he wouldn’t be fooled. They exchanged a look again and there was something different in it this time. James ruffled Remus’s damp hair and stood and Sirius walked him and Peter to the door where they all exchanged more hushed words. When Sirius came back he sat on the bed where James had been and he put his hand over the red mark on Remus’s arm and slid his thumb back and forth and back and forth. God, for the certainty, Remus thought he would have done anything. He watched at the light moving on the floor. After what seemed like a long time Sirius said, “What do you need me to do?”

Get me something, was the first thing. Go on out there and get me something fucking good. Then the next thing, which was what he said: “Leave me alone.”

 --

There was another jump and when he opened his eyes Lily was sitting there on the edge of the bed, holding a steaming bowl, chipped and undecorated white ceramic; the smell of it had awoken him when it turned his stomach. “You gotta eat,” she said as soon as she saw his eyes open. “Sirius says you ain’t eaten in a couple days and you need your strength.” It looked like really her and he wanted to believe it was so desperately he didn’t push it. Slowly he sat up; his stomach turned again but he chewed his lip to keep the bile back. Lily was staring at him with thinly masked pity. He was sure inside the shirt which was still the only thing he wore he had truly become only bones, finally. She herself bore another thing within her eating at her substance in perhaps exactly the opposite way. Carefully she passed him the bowl and he accepted it in his shaking hands. It smelled like straight beef broth and some part of him was starving for it even as the rest revolted. “I’m gonna sit here til you drink it Moony,” she said.

The sunset was coming in onto the floor and goldening her skin and hair and she watched him intently as he lifted the bowl to his mouth and drank. A memory fixated itself in the front of his brain without warning and he felt a drop trace down his neck and palmed it away as he handed the empty bowl back to Lily, who was smiling now, hardly perceptible. “Thank you,” he said.

Of course it was Lily. She had reached for the knob of his knee adjacent to her beneath the blankets. “How are you feelin.”

“How are _you_ feelin.”

“You first,” she said, really smiling now, her white teeth refracting the light through the window.

“God,” he said, “Lily. I can’t take this any more.”

“Hurts?”

“Everything…” His gut now mainly, fervently protesting the arrival of the broth. “I’m so fucked up, worse than ever, can’t tell which way’s up, can’t tell who’s who.”

“It’s really us,” she said, getting it, somehow. “I promise, I swear to you. D’you think I’d lie to you, kid?” She set the bowl on the floor beside her boot and one long-fingered hand wrapped beneath her belly. “You’re like a brother to me Moony. And I know to James and Peter too. You’re the toughest man I ever met and any of them would say the same and he don’t even know the half of it. And you can get through this damn thing I know and every other bit of shit that comes your way. Ride right through it and on into the fuckin sunset. And as for me, have a feel –” She took his clammy hand by the wrist and held it over her belly, her fingers knit over his, tight and smooth and cool, like the flicker of his own mother’s hand inside the memory, callused from farmwork, gentle… “You’re shakin like a leaf,” she said, very softly, almost to herself. “Goddamn.” Against his palm something moved, and then again.

 --

Next it was dark in the window and someone was knocking gently on the door. It took every bit of strength Remus could muster to sit up in bed and call, “Come in.” Still everything hurt but at least the violence in his stomach had calmed while he slept.

The person at the door was Sirius, who stood tentatively on the threshold holding the red book and a carafe of milky water and looking very nervous. “Lily said you seemed mighty lucid and you might want –”

Near on all Remus could do was nod and lie back down and Sirius climbed over him and sat with his back against the wall and opened the red book again and began to read and in the sound of the reading Remus shut his eyes. “Has any one supposed it lucky to be born? I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it…” After a while he felt Sirius shift and sit cross-legged with the book propped up against his knee; he reached so he could weave his fingers through the damp hair at Remus’s neck. Still he kept reading. Remus was nearly asleep when the rhythm broke so Sirius could bend and press a kiss against his shoulder.

 --

He woke up at dawn and realized when he turned after a few moments that the soft heat against his spine was Sirius’s back. The red book was on the pillow between them with a page folded over and Sirius was snoring, softly, blanket slipping off his shoulder with his breath. The world assembled, the veil lifting off it, and Remus thought, I have not felt this way since I was eleven years old. I have not come into being and awakeness alive in reality without the first thought screaming above all, _where’s your dose, Remus?_ Everything remained in order even when he sat to pour himself a glass of water from the carafe on the nightstand, and it even stayed how it was when he got slowly to his feet, bracing himself with his palm against the windowsill. He could feel the weakness in himself above all, the sense that he was completely hollow and made of a fragile exoskeleton like a reed or an insect, and then he knew he had killed that thing; it had been the one substance to him. His knees were trembling and he was desperately hungry.

Sirius turned in the bed but still he slept. The dawn light came in gently over his face throwing shadow and soft muted color and in it Remus could see the movement beneath his closed eyes and wondered what he was dreaming about. He looked like a picture in a romance book or like a painting from a museum – his dark hair loose and tangled, catching light in the strands of it, the neck of his shirt open over the collarbone. Mouth just open with a little wry lilt to it, so it was a good dream; Remus wondered how. He went close and leant over; he could smell sleep, a little sweat, desert, whiskey. Before he really knew what he was doing his thumb had skimmed over Sirius’s lower lip hardly touching it, mostly touching air; he didn’t want to wake him up but it felt – of course he had been so sure none of it was real. But the skin was real and it had been the same skin for years even the burnt arm, which Remus passed his fingers over. And the same hair, and the same nose and mouth and eyes and the same bones about the eyes and the same brows with the stray black hairs. Remus’s hands were shaking very hard and he almost could hardly touch at all but he knew there would have to be a seam for the mask somewhere if there was one and he would never be able to live with the suspicion if he did not know. He felt like a blind person trying to order what a face was supposed to be out of the complete black, the knowledge void. And now the soberest he had been in a decade he would have proof conclusive that he was well and truly fucked one way or the other and he could reason it out from there. After a minute he realized the reason he felt like screaming was out of longing to be kissed.

It took him a while to find his pants but when he had dressed he took a blanket from the spare bed and wrapped himself in it and went out into the silent hallway and downstairs in search of something to eat. On the stairs he caught glimpse of himself in an ancient mirror, silvering in cloud and spiderwebbed from falling, catching red dust in the cracks of it, and he froze in something like horror. It had been a long time since he’d seen his own reflection and in it he was very thin and so pale the scar across his face hardly stood out. His eyes seemed different as though the grey of them had been bleached out and even his mouth was bloodless. He thought he looked like death or an emissary thereof.

Perhaps food would do him something, he thought, or coffee, and his stomach growled fiercely at the thought of it. The barroom was dark but there was a light on in the kitchen and he pushed in the door and greeted the young cook woman in his rusty Spanish. She swung toward the door with her long black braid cutting the air and she looked surprised to see him at first but then she seemed to realize who he was. Perhaps someone would have mentioned the sick one, el doliente. He sat on a stool she produced and watched as she quickly assembled a plate of huevos rancheros heaping with varying salsas and chiles and poured him a cup of coffee with chicory and cinnamon. He ate quickly with his fingers and the woman said, “De donde es usted?” Where do you come from? La muerte, he almost said. Tennessee, or Nevada. The room upstairs at the end of the hall. “Aqui,” he said finally, “el desierto.”

He had not eaten so much in so long he only made it halfway through before he was full. She seemed to understand and smiled at him when she took his plate away and still he sat with her on the stool drinking the coffee as the sunlight came in through the single high window browning with grease and she began to warm tortillas for the others who would be coming down soon to eat. She was whistling something and he leaned against the cabinets listening to it and drinking his coffee and then without warning but for the soft footsteps outside Dumbledore pushed in the swinging door, clad in a collared white work shirt and neatly pressed grey trousers beneath a tailored waistcoat of vibrant navy. The Union colors were a stupid thing to wear in Texas especially arrayed in such a fancy getup, Remus thought, but Dumbledore’s unwavering confidence seemed to render it a nonissue. “Buenos dias, Senorita,” he said to the cook woman, who quickly brought him a mug of the chicory coffee. “And to you, Mr. Lupin,” he said then, as if he had just noticed Remus was there. He had not seen Dumbledore in the whole time he had been ill, however long it had indeed been, and stood carefully to shake his hand. “Shall we walk in the garden?”

He followed Dumbledore out through the dark hallway into the still morning. From behind him Remus saw he had tied his long gray hair up into a twist almost the way Sirius often did. The light outside split through his brain and he remembered a question he’d been meaning to ask. “What day is it?”

“Monday,” Dumbledore told him, “July 29th, 1861. You and Mr. Black rode back into town in the evening hours of July 20th so it has been near on eight days you’ve been quite ill.” They walked together through the quiet streets. A few women were out with their washing who lifted their hands to shade their eyes and watched them. “In that time Mr. Potter and Mr. Snape have returned from Albuquerque with several barrels of powdered morphine –” Something happened in Remus’s gut and he saw Dumbledore watching him out of the corners of his eyes – “which has been hidden in a secure location whose whereabouts are known only to me. Our dear Mrs. Potter, nee Evans, is due to give birth within the next few days and I have been informed the midwife in El Paso is prepared to ride out at a moment’s notice. That should catch you up on what’s happened in your absence, as it were.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“No,” Dumbledore said, “I must thank you, Mr. Lupin, for your sacrifices, which I can see have numbered many.” He clinked his coffee mug against Remus’s and the sound it made was bright like a small bell in the still silence of the morning. “You must know Mr. Potter and Mr. Pettigrew have attempted to endear me to you for many years and still it was with some trepidation that I authorized your pardon in exchange for this information. But I now see I should never have made the assumptions I did with regard to your character which is clearly of the highest ilk. Not to mention your strength of mind – your resilience. Yourself and all your friends are of a special breed. Frontier souls, the lot of you; true young Americans, if I may say so in these contested times.”

“God preserve the Union,” Remus said lamely, not sure of what else to add to the proceedings. It seemed an awful lot of flattery to wheedle around an apology but then he’d never really been sure what to make of anything Dumbledore said.

“Indeed, Mr. Lupin, God preserve the Union and also your sobriety.” His eye caught the glitter of the sun when he turned to Remus and he grinned wryly, thick white eyebrows shifting. “And with things duly considered we may as well pray for all our lives while we’re at it.”

 --

Sirius and Peter and James were down at the bar speaking hushedly over cleaned plates smudged with the remnants of green chile and they didn’t look up until Remus brought a chair over, having refreshed his chicory coffee in the kitchen, and sat. James crowed surprise – “hey, Moony!” – clapped his back, ruffled his hair. Peter reached across to shake his hand, a tentative smile whitely stretching his sunburn, and Sirius was biting his lip to keep from beaming. His boot pressed tightly against Remus’s under the table.

“Where’s Lily at?”

“In bed being fanned by her handmaidens,” James said. “Did Dumbledore take you on a walk?”

“He issued a very thickly veiled apology.”

“You feel alright?” This from Peter.

“Knees keep knockin,” Remus said. “Not gonna puke on ya so you can pull your chair back in.”

They related the three of them what had been established in the daily conferencing as the Plan From Here. “You and I have gotta be back in Comstock in exactly one week,” Sirius explained, stabbing the table with a finger. Remus saw he had bitten the nail ragged and bloody past the quick and halfway down the bed of it. “Three days’ ride so we oughta leave Friday.”

“Dumbledore said y’all secured the goods.”

“Snape was a right son of a bitch the complete trip but I’ll have you know I kept my damn cool,” James told him.

“Snape’s been telling the cavalry otherwise is the thing,” said Peter.

“Anyway you and I will carry it out like usual,” Sirius continued. “Dumbledore expects that Lestrange woman’ll meet us in El Pensamiento and perhaps she’ll have Riddle in tow. Thence we’ll have to set up further trade and then report back and consider our strategy from there. I’m choosing to remain optimistic we can do all of it with only very minimal contact with my mother.”

“Hell of wishful thinking,” Remus said. He wished it wasn’t so but likely she’d hound the both of them throughout the proceedings. He couldn’t shake the thought that perhaps she thought she knew something about them beyond the obvious.

“Allow me my damn dreams, Moony,” Sirius told him, but he was kind of smiling.

They spoke a while longer mostly regarding Snape and the venom he seemed to direct generally in James’s direction until they all finished their coffee and then parted ways, Peter to the stables, James to his and Lily’s room, Sirius and Remus to theirs at the end of the hall. “Need a bath,” Remus said, feeling deeply exhausted. That it was from a morning’s mild activity that had also included several cups of coffee made him mildly nervous. “Think there’s puke in my hair. You can go after me if you like.”

“I ain’t going after you if there really is puke in your hair.”

“Likely outta luck, then.”

They brought up a big tin washtub and a few buckets of lukewarm water with which to fill it. Just as well it wasn’t hot considering it was already striking a hundred Fahrenheit outside and likely it would only continue to climb. Still it felt good to rid the dust and an eight-day sickness worth of cold sweat. The last time he’d really bathed had been in the Rio Grande.

Sirius was sitting on the bed watching him with an interest that seemed to approach the clinical. “You look really – well you look damn good Moony, I been meaning to tell you.”

He cocked an eyebrow out of sheer shock to hear it. “Thought I saw death in the mirror this morning.”

“Well you could do to eat some but you look – I don’t hardly know. Your eyes look different.”

“Thought it was a little – in a bad way.”

“No.” Sirius got up from the bed and padded over and knelt beside the washtub and Remus could feel his own heart hammering just in the closeness and the smell of him and the soft gathering memory pressing inside his brain feeling golden, warm, smelling like earth. A very different kind of starved anticipation entirely. “Do you really feel alright?”

“Today I do. It’s like – it’s partly normal. It’s normalish but without. But – ”

Sirius kissed him and Remus could taste chicory in it and desire and the buried despair that seemed to make everything so damn desperate. Something like incredible relief washed through him alongside the rush of arousal; it was clear they would both rather do this than talk about it. The silence spread out in the room but for the soft ripple sound when Sirius dipped his hand beneath the water. “Cold,” he said, against Remus’s mouth.

“Feels good,” he told him, breath already tight, “in the heat. It feels – ”

Sirius climbed in with him with all his clothes on and the fabric sheer and soft as velvet beneath the water sticking wetly against skin showing the scars beneath and nipples and the tattoo and Remus could feel Sirius’s gooseflesh against his mouth and fingers and wondered at the cause of it.

\-- 

Days later in the night Remus woke slowly into the surface of things naked and tangled with Sirius about the legs thinking he had heard something beyond the calls of the night birds their or breath or heartbeats. He got up and dressed and went out the door still hardly awake and crept down the darkened hall beneath the shadow eyes of the old portraits and he stopped when he heard the voices and saw the light cast from within the room in a golden wedge across the floor. Through the slightly open door into James and Lily’s room he saw Dumbledore was cuffing up the sleeves of his white work shirt and speaking in his calm and removed rumble and Remus could hear James’s voice in a whisper edging on hysterical. When he went to the door Lily was in the bed looking serene but quite pale and with her red hair wild across the pillow and matted with sweat and he realized what he had walked in on with a sudden shock like a punch to his gut. “Come on in Moony,” she said, voice sounding tight. James’s head snapped to the door and the rictus his face bore softened infinitesimally upon sight of Remus. Dumbledore looked resoundingly unsurprised.

“Shall I go get Pete or Sirius or – ”

“Just come on in and close the damn door, kid,” Lily said. He did and then sat beside her cross-legged on the dusty hardwood and took her proffered clammy hand in both his own. She squeezed his fingers and cast a weak smile about at him and then James. “Quit fuckin lookin at me like I’m on my damn deathbed, gentlemen,” she announced, “pardon my fuckin French.”

The baby arrived in an hour by which time half the cavalry was clustered round the door, including Pete and Sirius and conspicuously missing Snape. Remus and Dumbledore had draped the wool blanket over Lily’s knees to retain an ounce of her privacy though she had insisted quite loudly she was accustomed to strange men ogling her damn privates. “Not fuckin gratis, though!” she shouted, and only Sirius laughed. She was squeezing James’s hand now so tightly the tips of his fingers paled considerably and she clenched her fine white teeth and otherwise made hardly a sound. The baby itself was beautiful and caramel of skin like coffee with a bit of milk and Remus nearly wept to see it, a tiny boy, screaming in life, already with a thatch of dark hair as kinky as James’s, who had fainted. He had to be brought around by Sirius with a slap to the face and then sat beside Lily in the bed absently tickling the baby’s foot looking not unlike he’d been bucked from his pony. Outside over the desert the sun was pushing at the horizon.


	10. X.

X.

Holding Harry – Godfathers – Marfa Lights – the Malfoys – the Road to El Pensamiento – Death Eaters at the Ranch – the Deal – the Shadow on the Bluff – the Plan from Here –“Trust Me” – Lily’s Gun – “O Pioneers” – a Necessary Conversation – Back to Comstock – Treasures in the Basement – Hired by His Mother – Another Deal - Departure

 

Directly before they rode out once more to Comstock Lily condescended to let them each hold the baby while she went down to the jakes to piss. Remus first, because she liked him more, and he looked awed – deeply stunned there could be a life so very tiny and so very loud. The baby – Harry, was the baby’s name, but Sirius could hardly think of him as anything but _the baby_ – had the front of Remus’s shirt in two tiny brown fists and was staunchly uncomprehending Remus’s soft admonitions to “Shh, shh.” Remus looked so very nice holding a baby it made Sirius think about the future in a way that was vaguely horrifying and likely completely impossible. He was smiling a little and shuffling his feet around in their disgusting boots in a semblance of rocking which appeared more like terrible dancing. Even having just a scant few days with a normal appetite he appeared somewhat less like a jumble of bones in a shirt and in the morning light through the window his skin and eyes were clear and rich, sunburn peeling his nose. There was a bruise inside his collar against his neck fading like a dead flower. Pleasure and fear, Sirius thought, looking at him. The fear was low in volume but it was still present. It had mutated somewhat since his sickness because of how tenuous this version of him seemed upon this earth. Anything could shift it back again and perhaps if it did Sirius wouldn’t even know.

James had insisted on naming Sirius godfather for some reason and Lily had countered that it should in fact be Remus. “None of us is the more responsible,” Remus had said in an attempt to quell argument, which was fair. Lily had then smacked them both across the face for smoking around the baby and Sirius still had a mark from it. Remus was better at rolling with punches. “Wanna hold him,” he was saying now. He’d gotten the baby to shut up somewhat and when he transferred the weight over to Sirius with their shirtsleeves snagging in the closeness the baby looked with his liquid green eyes so like Lily’s up into his face and quieted. Then he grabbed a fallen strand of Sirius’s hair in his wet fist. Remus was hovering so close at hand Sirius could feel him breathing. “You oughta be nominally his godfather on account of he likes you more,” he said very softly. The thundering distantly in his consciousness was either his own heartbeat or the sensation of Lily coming up the stairs at a run concerned they had dropped the kid out a window.

\-- 

They rode again across the now-familiar territory to Comstock past the water stop at Marfa and to the South there across the desert in the deep black night Remus swore he saw three independent points of light moving and hovering each like a dipping bird after a cache of nectar. Sirius told him they must have been falling stars perhaps or the torchlights of smugglers moving in the night refracted against a standing pool of water but he knew it had not rained now for weeks in this desert. “You think about ghosts ever,” said Remus. The moon caught the white part in his eyes and the flash of his teeth when he smiled.

“Hardly ever,” Sirius told him. “I never seen one or evidence thereof.”

“I saw – ” Remus started, then he stopped. “I don’t know. Always thought I could feel my mom after she passed.” He had never spoken about his mother before and Sirius let the silence stretch out hoping he would say something more in it. “Never saw nothin when I was a kid. Except once, I was maybe five or six, I got real sick. Near on died, I can tell you. I could feel her like, with her hand on my forehead. Opened my eyes up and there was no one in the room.”

“You seen ghosts since then?”

Remus kind of winced at him in explanation. “Well not – just ghosts in my own head.”

“All ghosts are in people’s heads.”

He smiled and gestured around at the whole spreading world in the darkness. “What do you call this one?”

The evening following they stopped outside the settlement at Sanderson and waited for cover of darkness before they led the horses around in a wide berth on account of they had heard tell it was crawling with Confederates and through his spyglass Sirius had indeed seen the stars and bars flying from the pole atop the highest building. They likely would’ve been shot on sight with the quantity of drugs they were carrying not to mention the barrels were clearly marked with Union insignia Sirius kept trying to scrape off with a fingernail while they rode. They were hardly breathing at all in the darkness through that territory with the horses’ eyes bound in cloth so nothing would spook them and when they made it past a protective spinal ridge of mountains to the east side of town Sirius felt he could breathe deeply for the first time in an hour. They put their bedrolls out and not so soon had he sat down than Remus was in his lap with his knees cracking shoving him back by the chest with the hand not directly occupied in undoing both their trousers. They realized after the fact they had not hobbled the ponies in their haste and they were far across the plain in search of water shadowed gently by the high white moon.

 --

They rode to the door of Sirius’s mother’s house on the long plain in Comstock not long past the noon hour of the Fifth of August and tied their ponies up amidst the five others in the front. They were rough horses, unshod and unbrushed, a few branded with esoteric insignia or painted in the manner of the Indians. They nipped at Sirius’s old bay but Remus’s half-wild skittish red seemed to intimidate them somewhat. Remus agreed to stay outside and keep his eye on the goods and Sirius felt suddenly deeply guilty about his unsurety. He wondered how long it would be until he would trust Remus alone with something of that nature and then he wondered how long they would have to be around things of that nature to begin with. It seemed an unfair temptation Sirius was not sure he himself could have withstood had he been in Remus’s position. Still there was hardly another choice so he left Remus alone with the horses and the drugs and, feeling eyes on his back and elsewhere from the windows, went to the green door and knocked.

The slave girl let him in with her eyes downcast and when he went through the cold and still moldy-smelling halls to the sitting room his mother was there discussing something quietly with her old associate Lucius Malfoy and his frigid wife Narcissa, who alleged to be tangentially related to the Black line in a way Sirius had never cared to investigate. Conversation ceased abruptly upon Sirius’s appearance on the threshold. Also in the room were three of Lucius’s customarily oversized henchmen, longterm ranchhands of the best families, brawn above all, perhaps a single complete sunburnt muscle. Sirius extended his hand to shake and each neglected to take it, including his mother. Clearly nothing worth discussing remained to wheedle out of the silence so Sirius said, “Shall we go then?”

“Where’s your Mr. Lupin,” said his mother. Sirius very much did not like the way she said _your._

“Outside,” Sirius told the room, “with the goods and the ponies.”

Narcissa laughed horrifically like a piccolo in a marching band offset at the devil’s interval. Sirius remembered having tea with them all as a child and them permanently looking as though they had caught whiff of something deathly. In the memory he was kicking the legs of the table and had blamed it on Regulus when Lucius’s teacup tipped hot liquid over his crotch. Of course no one had bought it and he’d been beaten for it once they had all ridden out.

Remus was outside squinting up into the sun from beneath his hat and smoking one of his limp rollies. He too offered his hand for the cavalry to shake but they did not accept it, though they did appear surprised he hadn’t run off with the lot. Sirius did not want to admit as to his own incredible relief but he gave Remus a nervous smile he saw tentatively returned. They would ride through the night and reach El Pensamiento in the late morning of the day following, where they would be expected, Lucius explained, though by whom he would not divulge.

They rode into the spreading of the day and across the Rio Grande about the peninsulas it made preceding its run into Lake Amistad. It was heavy with silt and sat low within its banks in this late season and frothed shallowly about the bellies of the horses and into the open boottops of the cavalry. Never had Sirius ridden with the Malfoys nor would he ever have trusted them as accompaniment within that territory had he had a choice and he knew he would not sleep that night in fear they would kill or otherwise incapacitate him and Remus and abscond with the drugs. His hand was itchy to hold his gun and he could tell Remus was near on the same state – or it was the proximity to evil, and the morphine.

For the first hour they attempted at small talk but it soon failed miserably and they rode in silence but for the clopping of the hooves of their horses against the hard ground. They rode through deep washes filled with water when the lake runneth over and now dry and white with silt. At night Sirius rode close beside Remus while he slept in the saddle with his head bowed and red mouth soft and wished desperately they could lie down together in some shadow to rest in the darkness but it could not be in that company or perhaps in any company. When Remus woke slowly and with his eyelids fluttering not long before dawn judging from the position of the stars he whispered to Sirius, “You sleep.” He yawned so loudly Narcissa turned her head.

“I’m alright.”

“You wanna be rested.” He had sleep in a corner of his eye and he looked so sincere and calm it felt as though he were telling Sirius to rest up prior to a rodeo or some kind of fancy dinner. “Trust me,” he said. Sirius closed his eyes and the last thought before sleep – why is it so damn hard?

 --

Remus nudged his knee when dawn had broken and split yellow like an egg yolk across the desert. “Just about two hours’ ride now,” Remus said when he saw Sirius’s eyes open. “Not long past them hills.” They were low against the horizon, their color not yet drawn out by the haze. Remus pressed a drop biscuit into his hand and smiled to belie his nervousness.

El Pensamiento was not so much a town as a vacated ranch left to rot in the long valley between two high buttes. Tangles of cattlebones haunted by rattlesnakes indicated what had grazed here in the past not long distant. It had not been more than a few years since the abandonment by the state of the buildings, low and red adobe brick standing proudly, empty corrals with the fences still standing, watertroughs not yet overgrown. The wire and metal had been taken to scrap and the side of the barn bore the interwoven skull and snakes, crudely painted there in whitewash like its own ghost. The haze had come down with the morning as the sun rose into the day and another cavalry was there awaiting. As Lucius rode at the head of their own column Bellatrix Lestrange rode at the head of the other, sitting sidesaddle across the back of her stamping and sinewy black pony, lips and fingernails red as ever, wild hair wilder still in the desert wind. The others who rode with her Sirius did not recognize on account of they wore high black hoods they must have been sweating bullets under. Against their deep robes were necklaces whose adornments took twisted and blackened forms. Their horses shied at the sight of them and tried to move off into the shadow out of sight but they kept onwards until Bellatrix dismounted.

“Go on ahead, boy,” said Lucius, turning with a cold smile. Remus got down, keeping his hand against his horse’s flank for its comfort, and when he looked up Sirius realized Lucius’s comment had been directed at him in fact.

They went forward together amidst the stamping legs of the Malfoys’ ponies leading their own skittish horses as Bellatrix led her own big black and when they stopped not far apart it snorted, scattering blood-swollen flies. Bellatrix smiled her raw meat smile and Sirius saw within her eyes the same hungry thing once in Remus’s. He hardly had seen it before perhaps in his drunkenness at their first meeting but it was present now. She eyed the barrels lashed to his pony’s back and then she eyed him and then Remus and he sensed some understanding between them. Her cold smile spread wider about her face like the grimace of some clown. He was standing so close by Remus he could feel muscle tighten in the shock of it. “Gentlemen,” she said, the smile distorting with her speech. She had lipstick smudged across a yellow tooth as though she had been drinking blood.

“Miss Lestrange.”

She pressed each of their hands with her cold and clacking bones and Sirius felt the clammy metallic texture of her ring. “Is this the negotiated?” She nodded over Sirius’s shoulder at the harness he and James had rigged for the barrels.

“Yes ma’am,” from Remus. “Shall we rig it up?”

“Go on and get it astride Macnair’s pony while I discuss our terms with Mr. Black.” She flung her beringed hand up and one of the hooded men spurred his horse forward. It was branded along the sweating black flank with the skull and snakes and its eyes rolled near with madness. Light reached not further inside the hood than to illuminate the blunt point of a noise cut flat as a punitive measure for some crime. They would do it for horse thieving to the East, Sirius remembered from some horror story of his father’s.

Remus had handed his reins to Sirius and taken the barrels from the pony and brushed past them toward the Death Eater Macnair and his wild horse. “When did our Lupin quit?” said Bellatrix, steeling Sirius direct in the damn eye.

Clearly she knew and there wasn’t any getting around it. “Not long ago,” Sirius told her, unwilling to divulge anything else.

“Watch him like a damn hawk,” she said. “I done lost a lotta product to the allegedly dormant habits of those who fancy themselves fixed for good.” She reached back to her pony’s tooled leather saddlebag and withdrew a canvas pouch inside of which gold made a vibrant sound. “First of many,” she said as she pressed it into his hand, “provided y’all can maintain the quality of product and service to which we have all become accustomed. I take it you’ll run it on down here with the Malfoys.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Fine. Fine folk. Go on ahead and wire me in Coyame from Comstock when you’ve got goods to deliver. That all?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Good day, then,” she said, and she took his hand once more to shake, then she took Remus’s when he came up at Sirius’s side to take back his pony’s reins. “Godspeed to you both.”

When they turned and mounted up they found the Malfoys had already begun riding out to the North, hooves pounding, dust kicked up in a white cloud. Remus sidled his horse up so close its sweaty flank pressed Sirius’s leg. “Look back when you can,” he said, an electric current through his voice, “look back and up on the butte Westerly and be fuckin smart about it.”

Sirius did under the guise of brushing a fly from his ear. Behind them Bellatrix had taken up the rear of her party and the hooded riders had kicked up dust of their own, concealing the column. On the top of the Westerly butte was a black smudge Sirius at first took for a gnat in his eye or a speck of dust. He strained to see it in any detail and when the form of it turned he saw it was a man who wore a wide-brimmed black hat, otherwise featureless in the distance. He turned his back upon them and disappeared past the summit and when he did the sun caught and cast a bright spark of silver. When Sirius turned back toward the Northern trail again Remus was looking at him. “Riddle,” he said flatly, completely assured. Here Sirius had been thinking La Llorona. When he looked back again the shadow was gone.

 --

In four days’ time in the sitting room in the hotel in Van Horn Snape was skeptical to put it kindly. “Aren’t hallucinations par for the damn course with you Mr. Lupin?”

“Ain’t touched a drop of nothin in two and a half weeks and any of y’all could vouch for it likely.”

“I saw him too if you need a second fuckin opinion,” said Sirius.

“Could’ve been anybody,” someone contributed.

“I just don’t see anybody else even tangentially intrigued by the situation mounting up on a goddamn butte looking down upon the proceedings,” James said. He looked like he had not slept in the whole time they had been gone which likely he had not. “Any old Death Eater would’ve been down there with ‘em or back at Coyame. Plus that Bellatrix did tell these two if she and Riddle liked what they saw they’d be in touch. How else he gonna know if he likes what he sees?”

“My thinking exactly, James, thank you,” said Remus.

Dumbledore had his forefingers steepled up against his lips and overgrown white mustache. “What do you think we ought to do from here?”

“We had a few notions,” said Sirius. He and Remus had discussed on the desert south of Marfa on their ride back Northwest, too keyed up to sleep and too tired to ride and already having attempted to knock each other out with fucking. “First off is my mother and her associates clearly have some connections with these people. Bellatrix knew the Malfoys by sight.”

“Ranching family out of La Pryor,” someone else noted. “Texas Rangers said they had an eye on ‘em at one time but that was before the war.”

“I owe my mother a favor,” Sirius said, “so I was thinking I’d let her redeem it and see if I can – well, if she’ll let me in on any goddamn family secrets.” Remus had been affronted by this proposal for some damn reason and they had fought on it briefly and it had devolved considerably into more fucking in the process of which Remus had flung his elbow into Sirius’s eye. He had hardly felt it in the general ecstasy of the proceedings but now it was turning purple and the bone about throbbed dully. Remus kept kissing him there in apology but Sirius did not in fact mind how tough it looked and especially how impressive it was as an injury to receive from sex. He did however like how soft Remus’s lips felt against his eyelid. “Don’t go there,” Remus had told him on the desert after they had tried to winnow through it in any number of ways. “Don’t fuckin go back there cause she makes you feel like shit under her damn heel and she will everytime.”

Presently Remus told the room, “On our next deal gonna try and get in with Bellatrix and them and see if they’ll let me ride on back down to Coyame accompanying.” Of course Sirius had not liked that idea when Remus had initially presented it and that too had been an agent in the wild, desperate nature of the fucking that had followed. It seemed a poor idea to leave Remus alone with several proven murderers and hopheads and a seemingly unlimited quantity of the drug he had managed to abstain from just a scant few weeks, half of which had been spent in utter delirium. “Trust me,” had been the thing that Remus had been saying on a dreamlike loop in Sirius’s ear with the sound in it slipping further and further until it was just a whisper, until it was just a movement of his open mouth, and Sirius had been chasing at it, wanting desperately to hear something else, something he could actually do; it didn’t hardly matter what it was. “Trust me – trust me – trust me – trust me – ” but nothing else seemed to matter to Remus at the time except that, and coming. Sirius flipped them when Remus turned limp and fucked him through it into the belly of the silence, the sound of the echo there, the flush of heat at the pure blazing center of consciousness. Afterwards he found a tiny stone had wedged into the heel of his hand and Remus raised himself shakily on an elbow to kiss delicately like the landing of a moth about his eye, which was swelling already. “Sorry,” he had said, soft in the silence, “I’m sorry.” Perhaps he was talking about something else entirely and Sirius had felt low in the pit of his stomach some sensation of plummeting that had not yet completely subsided. All was not yet lost necessarily and he had had to remind himself of it at intervals since then.

“How often is she expecting a product?” Peter asked, dissolving reverie.

“Ain’t no timeframe,” Sirius explained. “She just said to wire down to Coyame when we got more. Figure we should give it a week more before we let her know and we sure as hell shouldn’t do any communication from here.”

“We got enough for maybe four more deals the size of what you just delivered,” James said. “Garrison will have likely cleared out from Albuquerque by the end of the summer so that might be the last we’re like to get.”

“That there’d be the timeframe then,” said Remus. “Four deals, say, one every three weeks, we’ll be lookin at the end of October to have some kinda concrete information. Or a plan, I guess, or Riddle’s head.”

“And if we got none of the above and no remaining product?” This from Snape, for whom this outcome seemed obvious.

“Make some kind of big fuckin stand,” Sirius said. “Ride on down there and burn Coyame. I don’t know. Go out in some blaze of fuckin glory.”

Everyone was quiet for a minute chewing the cud of it over and Sirius heard Remus sigh or something very softly under his breath. “That won’t be necessary,” Dumbledore said through his steepled fingers, but he did not sound entirely convinced.

 --

The four of them went walking out through town afterwards. “Thought you two oughta know Pete and I found a spot to make a stand,” James said. “Didn’t get a chance to tell you last week.”

“Due East-Southeast of here just in those mountains there’s a big red bluff with a slot canyon through it,” Peter explained. “Two-ended so if they don’t know about it you could likely ride through and lose ‘em had you enough advance and a rear guard.”

“Alright,” Sirius said, “Good to know, thank you gentlemen.” He knew they were like to know about the slot canyon because after all Bellatrix knew about every damn strike of lightning or whatever and he could tell Remus understood that too because of the way his brow had furrowed. “How’s the kid, James,” Sirius said, to change the subject, and James put this big glowing smile on that brought light even into his very tired eyes. Remus clapped his back and was also beaming. It was sweet how much Remus loved that kid, Sirius thought. It seemed to indicate that somewhere in him was a residual affection for innocence.

“Very loud,” said Peter dryly. “That’s my only understanding of how James’s spawn is doing.”

“Like you didn’t holler your damn lungs out as a baby,” said James. “I’m getting accustomed to it.” His smile stretched impossibly. “Lily’s a great mum.”

“Kid’s gonna be cursing a blue streak by the time he can talk,” said Peter, but he was smiling now.

“That may be true,” James admitted.

“Wouldn’t expect nothin less from the spawn of the two most foulmouthed motherfuckers in North America,” said Sirius. James smacked him across the shoulder playfully but it still hurt.

“Told her she oughta ride out to El Paso for the time being but she wouldn’t budge,” James said, and the mood blackened again. “She says she ain’t ridin with a damn baby but I know she just won’t leave us. Think she’s got some voyeuristic interest in bloodshed.”

“Get her a fuckin gun, James,” Sirius advised. Peter laughed then quickly shut up when he realized the rest of them were serious. “She like to be a damn good shot.”

“You’d give a woman a gun what with all their – feelings, and their general squeamishness?” This, of course, from Peter.

“Women see a good deal more blood than us lest you fuckin forget,” Remus said. “She might already have a piece, James. She used to have one in her dresser drawer back in Genoa.”

“Yeah,” James said, “I know cause once she pulled it out on me. Believe it was just after you spilled the beans as to the manner of our acquaintance, Moony.”

“Your pregnant girl pulled a gun on you as you proposed marriage,” Sirius recapped, “on account of your dear friend had told her we’d all become acquainted in a jail cell… Classic, sir.”

“Sounds like a story from a ladies’ magazine,” said Remus, grinning as he rolled up a cigarette. “Plus Lily said you cried some.”

Peter laughed and James punched Remus in the arm. “You wouldn’t fuckin shed a single manly tear if a lady pulled a goddamn gun on ya and her pregnant with your fuckin kid?”

“I mean it ain’t like to happen anyway,” Remus said. “And besides I ain’t no stranger to a gun in my face. The pregnancy like to be more shocking so I guess I’d fuckin faint.”

Sirius was hardly yet accustomed to how Remus smiled when he truly meant it and how it twisted up his whole face into something almost a little different and how the long white scar in it could almost be mistaken for just another line about his eyes from laughter.

\-- 

They ate dinner all together in the bar and brought a plate of enchiladas up to Lily and the baby when they had finished. She was in bed reading the red book of Whitman Sirius had found in the desert and read to Remus in his sickness and she had come to “O Pioneers!” which she was reading aloud to the baby. She accepted the plate without quitting because perhaps the baby only lay beside her in relative silence because of the cadence of her voice. Still she eyed all four of them with a laugh wedged in with the drama in her voice when she read the “full of manly pride” part.

Sirius and Remus left them after some time and went to their room at the end of the hall where they lay in their clothes atop the blankets while outside the sun dipped into the West signaling another day closer to the damn inevitable. They were splitting a cigarette Remus had rolled and wouldn’t let go of; Sirius would take his whole wrist when he wanted a drag, then Remus would ash it into the chipped blue willow saucer resting on his own chest. He had been trying to say something, Sirius thought, for many days, and finally it was close to his tongue. He himself just had to keep quiet and let it out the way you would coax marmots from their dens to shoot. It was nearly dark in the room and only shadows visible cast in the burning ember of perhaps the fifth cigarette like lightning having struck something dead on the desert – then Remus spoke, voice cutting silence. “Put you through a right gauntlet.”

“What, bein ill?”

“Yes, well, in that way. I was so sure you weren’t you. I know I put y’all through hell but you most of all.”

“Well you did but – Remus I’ll only be pissed if I have to do it again.”

“I ain’t gonna do it again,” he said. “I swear to you and God. I swear on every grave of every dead thing. I ain’t gonna touch a lick of it again. I just need you to fuckin trust me cause my own guilt’s enough to make me fuckin sick.” He sighed into the silence. “Keep dreamin about it and when I wake up it takes me a minute to realize it didn’t happen and all I can think is you and how I made you work. And how if it’s for nothin then – ” He took a long drag and stubbed the cigarette out and passed the willow saucer back up on the nightstand. “Never even known how you put up with me in the fuckin slightest.”

“Well you put up with me so I owe you one, don’t I?”

Remus laughed a little under his breath and then in the darkness Sirius saw him smiling. “Damn right,” he said.

“Ain’t easy,” Sirius continued. “Probably some madness involved and for certain some witchcraft. It’s workin for me though, is it workin for you Moony?”

“Most of the fuckin time.”

He was back on the same damn thing again and Sirius could tell it. Now there was a thing stuck in his own throat he couldn’t cough out into the still air between them and by the time he’d fought it forward, mostly garbled, he was sure Remus was near asleep. “Well if you ever feel tempted I – and otherwise I won’t ask ya and I’ll do my damnedest not to worry. And to trust you, like you say. And it’s not – I trust you with every damn thing else, so you know. And that’s all – that’s all I’ll fuckin say on the subject.”

Remus sighed again, slow and deep; his eyes were closed. Sirius thought perhaps he had not heard any of it at all or perhaps it had twisted into his dreaming but then he said “All right.”

 --

In another few days Sirius and Remus rode to Comstock with another load of the goods and from there they wired Bellatrix. Sirius’s mother condescended to let them sleep in the basement on their rolled-out pallets while they waited for a response and she had two of her slave girls bring down dinner – a thin stew of goat meat and crusty bread hard as a stone, which softened infinitesimally if soaked upwards of a minute. From a trunk in the corner Sirius dimly recognized from his childhood he drew out a full buffalo skin painted on the pale inside with Indian designs and he and Remus spread it out over the floor and admired it by lanternlight. It had been painted with a scene of battle and likely had been won or traded for something, perhaps a hostage. The ponies rode across it even as they were peppered with arrows and men crawled through blood toward a spattering of red stars hanging amidst the rendered firmament.

Sirius felt as though his heart would not slow down in that house and whenever there was a creak of footsteps upstairs he felt a warrior’s necessity to plant himself between Remus and the door and draw his weapon as though there were someone coming down who meant them both harm beyond even the manner of his mother. After a while his fingers would only twitch.

The next morning they rode to the post office to find they had received a telegram back from Bellatrix setting up a deal at El Pensamiento in three days’ time. They got a wire off to the Malfoys and agreed to meet once more at the Black ranch the day after next in order to run the goods down. Immediately following they rode to the shore of Lake Amistad and swam and Sirius thought Remus laughed too much so as to avoid talking about what exactly would happen from here. They raced to and from the sandbars at the eddys of the current fairly evenly matched in speed and Remus looked damn good wet with his chest heaving but there were people visible sunbathing on the far shore. At sunset they rode back to Sirius’s mother’s house and crept once again down to the basement where the slave girls brought dinner to them this time with fresher rolls, soft and warm inside and smelling like yeast. They had also secreted a dusty bottle of wine from the pantry, which they passed off smiling. It had been a long time since Sirius had drunk wine and this vintage was so old it was like ash in his mouth. It had a label in French neither of them could winnow sense out of.

It struck him perhaps his father and Regulus were both dead and perhaps even his mother was dead and appeared as a kind of shade of herself on account of the looming spectre of his memories and thus perhaps only he and Remus and the slave girls were alive in this house. Once more they fucked in lieu of talking, completely in silence but for their skin, and once Remus said “Oh, God,” before Sirius sealed his hand tightly over his mouth.

Afterwards he found some distant relation’s threadbare Continental Army jacket in the trunk and wore it only. It was very tight around the chest and would hardly button and Remus laughed and laughed.

The next morning they rode out deep into the canyons looking for a swimming hole Sirius had found with Regulus as a child but they did not find it and he wondered if it had existed at all. Back in the house his mother was in the sitting room staring at the closed curtains and he sat beside her, hearing Remus descend into the basement, the sound of his footsteps on the stairs. “Mother,” he said.

“Son,” she said, coldly, disbelieving as was customary.

“After tomorrow – I was thinking. Well, I owe you a favor, and – ”

She fixed him with her frozen eyes. Yes, he thought, certainly she was dead. He was sure he had heard some Mexican legend about it and wracked his brain in search but she had stilled the cogs of it, as she always had. “Sirius,” she said, and a chill slipped up his spine again, “Indeed I will have work for you to do.”

He supposed he ought to have been relieved on account of the Cause but he could summon not a feeling beyond the bitterness. Heavily he went downstairs where Remus was lying in his bedroll naked. “Come here, Sirius,” he said. Perhaps he would have been crying if he were a sight different. It was all very tender. Who knew when the next would be?

 --

When the Malfoys rode up around the noon hour of the day following Sirius and Remus were waiting outside eating sandwiches assembled by the girls and each had a flask of wine they had prepared hidden away inside his shirt. They rode out once more Southerly and through the night switching off sleeping and again just past dawn they rode into El Pensamiento where this time they waited for Bellatrix. The Malfoys spoke hushedly to one another and Remus paced, chain-smoking, and Sirius eyed the Westerly butte. In an hour’s time the telltale dust cloud materialized from the South and the form of Bellatrix appeared at the head of it, red and black in vapor like a bat. Once more she shook their hands and this time as had been hastily discussed Sirius went to load the casks upon Macnair’s wild pony. The horse was his height at the shoulder, black flanks shimmering with sweat like snakeskin, and though Macnair’s face was invisible beneath the hood Sirius could smell the sweat off him, tobacco, whiskey, the bitterness of laudanum. He heard Remus speak to Bellatrix and her laugh like a knife struck against rock and throwing sparks. When he turned he saw them shake hands and the same knife lanced through his gut. He felt in his mouth the words he wanted to say so desperately – _don’t fuckin do this, don’t fuckin do this, don’t fuckin die_. Instead he came up and shook Bellatrix’s proffered hand as well.

“Our Lupin’ll ride down with us and handle some distribution,” Bellatrix explained. Remus didn’t look at him. “And I’ve heard you’ll be doing some work with your mother.”

“Yes ma’am.”

It seemed she knew something; there was a cold laugh in her eyes. She pressed the money into his hand.

They saddled up and turned and rode. The Malfoys had begun to ride out once more and Sirius followed their dust past the empty ranch and when he could bear it no more he turned his head. Remus too had turned to look North, away from the rear of the column of Death Eaters, away from the South and the spreading of the haze of that day; he lifted his hand to his hatbrim and inclined it. Sirius thought, this can’t be far from what it must be like to be gutted in battle. It can’t be unlike this to be eviscerated such to have your intestines spilt out like a trunk of silks. Still he met Remus’s eyes across the churned-up desert expanse between and mimicked the gesture. Remus turned then back into the dust and Sirius looked about. There was no one on the bluff.


	11. XI.

XI.

the Death Eaters – Night in the Canyon – a Pack of Wolves – Dolohov’s Contingent – Juarez – the Things they Carried – Agua Zarca – Hungover – Buried in the Sand – Shipments from Guaymas – Return to Coyame – Bellatrix and the Anaconda – the Man on the Inside – Ride to Marfa – the Dream – the Old Camp – Midnight in Van Horn – Proof

 

When they had ridden out around the concealing butte Bellatrix called a halt and the company of Death Eaters shifted their hoods from their faces. They were all men – all of them white, Remus noted – and their faces were flushed red with the heat and sweat beneath the wool. Most were tattooed across the cheekbones, a few missing eyes and all with deep-set scars, and they eyed Remus in a familiar way, much the way Greyback had. “Lupin,” Bellatrix said, by way of introduction. “Macnair, Travers, Nott, Dolohov, Karkaroff, Avery.” Close up he saw they wore necklaces of bones and blackened fleshy bits about their robes strung on sinews perhaps formerly belonging to beast or man. A few had even strung the brittle bones of toes and fingers onto fishhooks to wear as earrings. They were all tattooed on the forearm with the skull and snakes, tapped in crudely with needles and with the black bone ink smudging beneath their skin, and on some the mark was so old and faded with sun that it was hardly recognizable. Some of them bore wounds about their arms like Remus’s own from dosing the powdered morphine, brittle silver lines through their sun-browned flesh like runs of precious metal through stone. He wondered in the corner of his brain not immediately focused on his own survival how the habit had started up for them and if it had been forced the way his had and if so if somewhere inside them they too yearned for vengeance and if so had they already carried it out and if so how? Did they wear the parts?

They rode through the sun’s slow arc in the spreading white-blue dome of the sky into the ending of that day and they rode on through the night toward Coyame. Remus drank only from his own canteen even when it had run empty and others were proffered. He was certain it would not be water inside. One by one the other men slept in the saddle and even Bellatrix did, sitting tall on her black horse, eyes closed. In the white frost of the moon dressed in their cloaks they appeared like bats hanging to sleep. When they woke they passed between them misshapen hunks of red-black jerky drawn from folds in their robes and Remus felt sick even as his stomach growled, not certain from what beast that meat had come.

Deeper than the guilt was the yearning alone. The thing woke up again just to talk in his ear. He could not sleep inside its voice and the fear until he finally grew so tired he dreamt with his eyes open that Sirius walked before him through a field of red flowers. When the real world came back, developing like daguerrotype into hazy color, it was dawn and they were at the shore of the Rio Grande. Remus filled his canteen and drank until he could nearly ignore every breed of hunger and they rode along the river through its steepening canyon until they rode along the base of it, cool in the shade of the day, and the stone towered red above them blackened with patina that seemed to flow downwards into the water like blood. The canyon wound in a curve against a strip of sky beyond which, perhaps, oblivion – and still the horses moved loudly through the still silty water and otherwise there was no sound.

Toward sundown they cut into a slot through a dry wash and made camp beneath an overhang where clearly they had overnighted previously. The skull and snakes had been cut into the black ashmarks of old fires and into the patina and stone and there were treasures buried there or concealed in caches in the rock including a skin bag of morphine powder they quickly broke into. Bellatrix dipped a red finger and rubbed it over her gums. Someone passed Remus the bag and a bloody knife but he passed out promptly and Remus scrubbed the knife off in the sand and rested everything to his side. His fingers were trembling. It would be so easy and so purely fine to just do it once and then perhaps not again. No one would ever really have to know especially not Sirius because it would only be the once. Likely he still remembered enough of the science of it to calculate a dose that wouldn’t be suicide and it would feel fucking good and he could sleep and he wouldn’t need to eat. Perhaps he would still be high enough when they rode out that the worry would shut up and the thing would shut up because it seemed like it was telling him all the worst directly in his damn ear. Like he couldn’t tell independent of its incessant narration that all these were fucking monsters who would gut him for the sport of it if they had the goddamn chance. In fact likely the only reason they hadn’t already was they understood his well-being was connected to a continued supply of drugs. That or they wanted a little fun first and perhaps tomorrow when the sun cleared the rim of the canyon they would take his clothes and his gun and his knife and set him loose running into the desert and give chase on horseback. When they caught up they would kill him by whichever manner seemed most delicious and following they would smoke all his flesh on the bone and they’d eat it as they rode. They would find the hotel in Van Horn and they would set running into the desert Sirius and James and Peter and Lily and the baby – 

Bellatrix pressed something into his hand and it was a smoky strip of meat warm from her saddlebags. Her eyes were swimming and being drawn into them was almost like being sucked into that very darkness. “It’s rabbit, boy,” she said. “I can hear your goddamn stomach.”

He expected to wake with a knife in his gut or worse but he lay in the darkness with his back tightly against the stone and tried to sleep listening to the soft sound of the river for comfort. He dreamt he walked through it alone in the depth of the night with the moon casting just a bare strand down through the stone into the darkness. He had been high in his dreams as long as he could remember and in this one it felt better than it had ever had but his arm would not quit bleeding and though he tried to staunch it soon the whole river was blood. Still he walked through it; it was tough going and it stank but there was nothing else to do. When he woke his heart was pounding and desperately to calm himself he thought of Sirius but found he could not summon completely the face inside his mind. There were only pieces and then it was gone into the desert.

 --

They rode out at dawn single-file through the dry slot and then across the plain of the desert to Coyame, where they arrived around the goldenhour of that day. In the bar they all drank Greyback’s mezcal and some added to theirs drops of laudanum and others maguey worms. In the morning they would divide into several outfits each comprised of three to five men and ride out once more across the desert in all directions carrying the smuggled goods to be brought to the desert villages and Southwards to the coast and into the green spine of mountains that ran Southerly still into the state of Sinaloa. Still others would ride to Sonora and to the trading posts on the border in Nogales and Yuma and Tijuana. Another outfit still would ride weeks through the desert to Mexico City, and Bellatrix herself would lead a party to Monterrey.

It was decided Remus would ride with Dolohov and a few others to Nogales and along the border to the sea. It had been years since he had ridden in the desert there but he knew they would have to ride close along the border in order to skirt the endless dunes of the great high desert. Dumbledore had said if he was found in that company he could not guarantee amnesty even on Californian soil and the Sonoran military had been wary of roving gangs of white men since the fiasco with John Glanton in 1851 but Remus figured they had not been caught yet.

Last he had ridden through Sonora it had not been long after Glanton and they had moved only at night. In the day they would find shade and take drops and sleep and they would wake sunburned and faint with dehydration and then they would ride again. The quarry had been a lode of hasheesh out of Ensenada and it was there that Remus first saw the sea. He had been twelve or so and had ridden with boys far older, lieutenants of Greyback’s all who had been present at his induction, who claimed to have ridden Southerly through Mexico and seen the Aztec pyramids there in the jungle painted as they were on the inside with the scenes of their violent killing rituals. They alleged one of their company then had taken some golden thing and died days later tortured in fever and they had left the icon to the forest.

He had been so not himself it was easy to become them. They moved together in the night and they slept at the same time and they took their drops from the same bottle like it was mother’s milk and Remus would open his mouth to the eyedropper like a baby bird. In the themness there was no fear. It was one body with parts interchangeable and it seemed if he died in the process it was of no import because there would be another. The head, the hands, the spine, the back that bent beneath the weight to be carried across the long plain. A pack like wolves beneath the command of the moon only and each beholden instinctually upon the other. Perhaps the only way it could be done was to unself completely and sacrifice consciousness to something at once larger and lesser, to the collective animal grist in the heart of man itself like another organ beating survival alone. It seemed to rule this territory like an evil star and it demanded the way any God did.

Most slept in the bar with their heads on the tables and woke at dawn, stretching with the loud cracking protests of stiff joints and muscles. Each took a swig from a bottle of mezcal that was passed and each was offered a canvas bag of unidentifiable jerky from the bar. They rode out unspeaking into the grey spreading of the light split in small companies to travel, their ponies laden with goods or towing makeshift wagons; one group even led a train of mules bound with crates of cotton. Otherwise each carried only the clothes on his back and his canteen and his weapon and his pipe or his drops or his satchel of powder.

Remus rode with his company to the Northwest where they would follow the river at the brim of its canyon into the West along to El Paso and Nogales across the high Chihuahuan plain. With every bump in the saddle he thought – it would be so easy – it would be so easy – it would be so easy – it would be so easy – and the sun passed overhead and behind and they rode along the river and still through the night keeping one awake always to watch at the horizon. When Remus was allowed to sleep hunched in the saddle just before dawn he dreamt inside the memory of that other ride long ago with boys who had since died overdosing and who waited only another chance to touch death inside this world as though anyone could do a thing like that and really live, ever, after.

\-- 

They rode through the day and not far outside Socorro heard gunfire distantly across the plain and spurred their horses onward into a wash where they all laid flat, the ponies’ eyes rolling in fear, and passed the single spyglass. It was a contingent of the Chihuahuan military and a mounted legion who wore no uniforms – they could’ve been smugglers or scalphunters – and they rode one after the other into the East exchanging fire. When they had passed there were bodies on the plain of horses and men alike. Greyback’s boys would have gone to scavenge but this company rode on keeping to the deep wash so as to stay marginally out of sight. The territory had long been contested despite containing nothing. Just before sunset they came to Juarez on the Mexican side of El Paso where they filled their canteens and their horses drank at a well in back of a saloon which clearly the Death Eaters frequented; when they entered, four of them shadowing the doorway, the silence spread over like a blanket, then whispers abounded, most in Spanish. Dolohov seemed to have history with the bar girl and she brought them a bottle of mezcal – marked with a brightly printed label and thus decidedly not Greyback’s – with four glasses, slamming the goods against the bar directly before them so aggressively Remus thought the glass would shatter. Indeed there was a chip out of the rim of one glass from which Dolohov himself drank, jaggedness splitting his upper lip; he was grinning like he didn’t feel it (perhaps he didn’t, he had taken his drops outside) and the blood was vivid inside his mouth. Later in the night the bar girl was clearly high and sat by Dolohov babbling in rapid Spanish with a tear in her eye punching him hard in the shoulder intermittently and eventually they disappeared. The rest slept in the stable with the ponies. It had begun to be cold at night and they huddled fully under their saddleblankets at the horses’ feet willing them still.

At dawn they rode out again to the West over the desert with Dolohov regaling them all with tales of his sexual conquests including that of the previous night’s bar girl and the others rebutting they would hardly condescend to fuck a woman with skin so dark and that they themselves were holding out for the white women in Nogales on the American side. Following there was hardly much more to discuss and they rode in silence and in that quietude Remus sidled up beside Dolohov. “What are we carryin?”

Dolohov fixed him with the dark cold eyes set deep above his tattooed cheekbones, then he spat and looked away. “Couple ounces of that Union morphine of yours, that I know. Bit of cotton – that’s the crate. Medical supplies which’re goin to Yuma. Syringes and gauze and the fuckin like. Booze – bit of tequila, bit of mezcal. And the goddamn doozy of it, Lupin, that there’s mercury on the back of your pony.” He had thought he had heard liquid in the barrel. “Of course the damn usual regarding the drugs. We’re meant to bring a shipment of hash back from Tijuana.” He spat again a grotesque bloody brown solution that indicated he had been chewing tobacco. “Miss Lestrange tells me you like to’ve done this run before.”

“Used to run with Greyback,” Remus said and Dolohov nodded slow. “Done it a couple times to Ensenada and to the playas… Mezcal for hash and the like, never with goods.”

“Utter fuckin madman that Greyback,” Dolohov said. “Worked for him roundabout til I got this gig.”

“Just a bit more order is all it seems different.”

“Yessir,” Dolohov laughed. “A bit, yes, a damn bit. Course Riddle’s another madman but a smarter one and I’d bet money he ain’t never touched a single tear of no fuckin poppy.”

“You ever met him?”

“Riddle?” Dolohov spat again. “No. How come?”

“Curious.”

“Don’t be,” said Dolohov, and his eyes grew impossibly darker when he fixed Remus again. “He’s like God, kid. Either you pretend he exists or you don’t but if you do it’ll be a sight easier come the judgment.”

 --

They rode through the night to Nogales and at dawn outside of town they hooded up at the approach of riders from across the border. Dolohov discussed terms with a sallow man in his Confederate dress uniform unironed in the morning haste and Remus and the others unloaded the mercury and the booze and some of the morphine to a few others, younger and even more uncomfortable in their ragged uniforms, who all tried to peek beneath their hoods. It was hot as all hell beneath them and when they rode out they stopped in the shadow of a butte and wiped the sweat from their faces and drank deeply from their canteens. To the South they ate a midday meal in a town called Agua Zarca where the bartender again seemed to know Dolohov but greeted him in far more celebratory a mood than the girl in Juarez had. Mezcal and whiskey were brought by the bottle and also delivered was a silver plate polished to a mirrorlike sheen bearing coca leaves and a tiny wood bowl of sweet lye in the Bolivian style. The company cheered upon seeing it and again when enchiladas in mole sauce were brought from the kitchen on another plate of fine silver accompanied by brilliant golden rice. They were feeling wild and tough from the coca and it soothed the pains of the riding over and most danced with the girls who came in when the sun began to fall. By dark there was a band playing the favorite music of that territory and the girls sang along and the men danced with them and the Death Eaters’ black wool cloaks spun when they moved like the soft wings of bats.

In the morning the bartender brought them each a bright knit bag of coca leaves itself containing also a smaller pouch of the sweet lye and they rode again hungover back to the border where they would have several days’ ride along to Yuma through the desert. Remus chewed coca to cut the headache down but it would hardly go; his hands shook so violently he had to clench them on the pony’s reins to keep from being noticed. He had slept fitfully and woken still drunk and it was catching fast up with him and he watched with a surge of jealousy through his throat like bile as the others of the company took their drops and rode into the searing sunlight with their heads deeply bowed. To be himself alone conscious amidst them all and leading the ponies and their loads due West-Northwesterly vaguely in the direction of Yuma seemed a foolhardy risk. What if a cavalry rode up and them all too addled even to ride hard for cover? The desert was flat about into the distant mountains blue in the haze and the earth was rough, sharp stone just hardly blown over by sand and the horses picked their way over it gingerly tossing their heads and nickering.

He rode in the silence at the head of the party hearing his blood in his ears through the headache and the sound of the wind across the plain and the breathing of his pony and so help him he thought of Sirius and closed his eyes. Sirius had three birthmarks constellated beneath the shoulderblade that bore the bullethole and he thought about lying in bed while Sirius slept and about touching them, then it all scattered. Worse than the pain was the yearning and worse than the yearning – worse even than the guilt – was that he could not remember exactly what it was he hungered so badly for. Moments arrived, images; they slipped away, they blurred themselves as though they were all the substance of desert mirage. With the drug things had been affixed in color and he had recalled Events as though they were still happening. He knew he hungered for it back and for Sirius back as though the two weren’t mutually fucking exclusive. He could choose only one and then never have the other again and that was how it was.

In this reality it seemed the color was duller and his mind in a near-constant fog with no pleasure in it. Perhaps someone loved him if they could manage it still through the distance and he had dragged this someone with him through hell or worse and with his blurred memory of the face came an onslaught of guilt weighing more than he could bear. He had thought he had killed that thing but the ghost of it had come back to speak to him and maybe it was not really dead at all. Still he dreamt he had the feeling of it back and outside the dreams the world unfolded completely beyond his control down and down some dark road into the canyon and there the narrowing of his own fate. And past each bend in the dragging river of it fear took some towering and monstrous living form that dissipated before he could catch sight. In short he had never felt so privy to the mad workings of his own mind and thus it was hardly a goddamn improvement over the constant addlement. At least that had felt fucking good, most of the time. Out here so far from Sirius and Lily and James and Peter he could not even recall what their warmth was like and it seemed as though it hardly existed at all. He would have wept if he could have. It seemed to prove he was really in hell that he could not summon even a single tear to release the suffocating weight of that feeling.

 --

They rode to Yuma across the vast powdery desert with the sand blowing soft as morphine and then they rode to Tijuana where they unloaded the last of the goods and took on the load of hasheesh – tinctures in brown glass bottles packed neatly in straw against their breaking and resin wrapped in canvas and stowed in barrels they secured to the haunches of the ponies. In the night they went down to the beach with the producers of the hash and a few women they had picked up in town and they lay in the sand setting off fireworks one had procured. They flared in showers of bright sparks against the stars and the high white moon. Remus watched at the constellations but could not recall which Sirius had said was the demon star. It seemed they all indicated death alone being as they withstood a passage he himself could not.

He felt marginally better once they had broken into the hash and one of the girls had come over to where he sat alone and set about burying him with sand. She was very high herself and quite pretty with dark skin bearing freckles indicating the mixedness of her blood and she was laughing and laughing and trying to joke with him in her rapid Spanish and though he hardly understood a word he tried to laugh when she laughed. The sand was warm from the day and with her strong hands she pushed it all over him until the soft heaviness of it felt much like being wrapped in a blanket or having submerged in a warm bath or having been enclosed in another type of womb entirely and the waves against the beach like some great woman’s heartbeat.

 --

With the hash they rode again East along the gulf to Puerto Penasco and then South to Hermosillo and finally to the Sonoran port city of Guaymas; there they met with the larger contingent of Death Eaters who had ridden out from Coyame leading the train of mules bearing the crates of cotton stamped with the stars and bars and the letters CSA. Dolohov’s company arrived in time to see the shipment loaded onto a freighter flying the Tricolor. The Death Eater Travers had headed up this party and he was speaking in broken French with the captain of the vessel as it was loaded by the French seamen and Riddle’s men. Riddle’s name was spoken and then Bellatrix’s and a guffaw was exchanged, then a flash of gold. Both companies rode out together herding the mules into the darkness rising in the East at the ending of that day. The animals had been packed again with crates marked such that Remus could not read and containing pistols and ammunition packed tightly in oilcloth that were allegedly of British origin. They drove the mules across the desert on a practiced route stopping at watering holes and still in the everpresent heat they lost ten animals and had to take the heavy crates of guns onto the backs of their own ponies.

They arrived back in Coyame on the evening of Wednesday the Eighteenth of September which meant Remus had narrowly missed Bellatrix’s rendezvous with Sirius and the Malfoys at El Pensamiento on that Monday. Having already made it back to town she was sitting at the bar in the saloon in Coyame drinking mezcal with drops and a red worm with its black eyes magnified by her glass. “Mr. Black sends his regards,” she said. Something in Remus’s chest twisted and he wondered if Sirius’s mother had not entirely exsanguinated him by now, bled him dry like a vampire and left naught but straw stuffed inside his skin. “I hope you’ve found our business to your liking.”

“Yes ma’am,” Remus said. He had hoped to have proved Riddle even existed but likely that had been wishful thinking. “Just – where’s the cotton come from?”

She fixed him much as Dolohov had when he had gotten curious but quickly she looked away and refreshed both their mezcals. “Overland through Texas so as to avoid the blockade,” she said. “Outside the squeeze of the Union’s damn anaconda. It comes into our oversight in Houston and from there we bring it on mules to the coast as you’ve seen.”

“What about the guns?”

“Direct from the source, Lupin. Consider us a kind of goddamn Pony Express.” She fished her worm out and took a bite as though it were candy. “Any more questions.”

“Did you really meet Jeff Davis?”

“Yessir,” she said. “Stupid man. Stared at my tits. That it?”

“Suppose so.”

She killed her mezcal and stood. “You gonna stick around with us?”

Remus stood too with the cracking of his knees seeming very loud in the silence. “Oughta ride East and see how goes it with the product,” he said. In fact he thought he hardly wanted to do anything. He wanted to crawl back into the sand and be buried there with all his effects in his own living ritual funeral… he wanted to ride and ride and let fate drag him and his pony by the ear into the West until they ran out of country. He wanted drops, mezcal, Sirius. A pinch – just a fucking pinch of that powder to rub into the great wound at the heart of him. The drug had been filling that hole for a decade and it seemed now it was hollow and bleeding once more and nothing would bandage it.

“Careful out there,” Bellatrix said, cocking one sculpted eyebrow in his direction. “There some kinda cavalry outta California ridin about the Trans-Pecos like they own the fuckin place.”

He willed his face still but couldn’t stop his eyebrows shooting up. For certain she could hear his heart pounding. “That so?”

“State sheriff and his huntin dogs from what I heard,” she said. From her leather bag she withdrew a golden case monogrammed with initials that were not hers and containing several long cigarettes rolled in vivid red paper. From the rich and sultry smell of it when she lit one she’d rolled beads of opium inside. “Never you mind it,” she told Remus, exhaling a cloud of opaque and delicious white smoke like a dragon, “we got a man on the inside.” He’d suspected it was coming – how else would they have a clue? – but still his heart dropped down through him, a cold stone. “They’ll be out of our hair soon enough.”

He shook Bellatrix’s long white hand and went out and attempted sleep again in the stables beneath the feet of his pony but failed miserably. Certainly they did not yet know exactly where the cavalry was stationed because if so they would all be dead. Additionally certainly whoever on the inside had not told her a peep about Remus and Sirius and the trade of the drugs because if they had both of them would be dead. Clearly they had just passed on that the cavalry were looking for Riddle and their approximate location, but why that and not the rest? Which led of course to the uncertainty at the heart of it – who the fuck could it possibly be? The options were few. He hardly knew half the Californians’ names on account they’d hardly spare the time of day for him if they weren’t sending him direct into the belly of the fucking beast. Most of them probably stayed sitting in that damn hotel unless they went out scouting in large groups. Peter had been scouting alone but never for more than a few hours at a time, and he was the type to follow the rules.

That left Sirius, which Remus couldn’t hardly think about because it made him want to go get high. Once he’d entertained the thought however it was stuck in the front of his mind. It was like a cold fist about his heart and the drug had always been quick to relieve that. He would’ve been able to tell, he reasoned finally. He could tell good from bad now after years of making the fucking mistake. Still he lay in the dark with his eyes open for hours and thought about all the proof one way or the other. Sirius had wanted him for years but had waited til he asked. Sirius had sat with him while he was ill even with his brain and his body turning inside out. Sirius made him laugh and made sure he ate. But Sirius was so frightened of his mother and he wanted her love so desperately it made him sick. Like Remus he had been hurt so badly when he was only a child and like Remus he was possessed by his own loneliness on account of it and like Remus he would have done anything to make it go away. He would make love to Remus in a field of wildflowers to make it go away. He would swear his allegiance to his mother to make it go away. Would he have sold them all out to make it go away?

He rose just before dawn and rode through that day alone across the now-familiar plain into the East in case he was followed. When it grew dark he turned back into the Northwest and rode under the moon to Marfa where he stopped to water his horse and catch a few hours’ sleep in an empty barn. He woke in only thirty minutes’ time screaming with nightmare and ran out into the evening chill to dunk his head in a bucket of water drawn from the well and pray shaking under the white moon and the spread sheaf of stars to the God in which he did not believe that it had not been and it would never be. By the time he had collected himself fully the stars had gone and he could feel the warmth of the rising sun at his back and he did not remember what he had dreamed.

Half-mad with it and the lack of sleep he rode as fast as he could push his pony into the dawn in the mountains searching through the territory and his memory (itself thoroughly wild and belonging in name only) for Greyback’s camp. He found the copse of dead cottonwoods just past midday and shortly thereafter came upon the scarred landscape where the tents had been erected. It was marked with burnt ash pits like craters left by cannonfire where the boys had burnt agave and flesh and over whose flames they had boiled water to brew poppy tea. They had hastily filled in the holes left by the tent’s stakes with thin sand and flat stones and they had left behind empty bottles which had contained mezcal and laudanum and which presently rolled in the soft wind leaving traces like the slitherprint of some beast. The sun had bleached the bones of animals and men and the leather that had been left about had turned near to stone in the heat. Into all the dead trees and stone around had been painstakingly carved in loving detail the wolf’s head and beside it the skull and snakes.

Again Remus wondered what they had done with the body and perhaps if it rested headless beneath his feet even now having been buried there as though burial were permanent in this territory and as if a man like Greyback could ever be truly interred. He wondered if it rested in a place where men would bring flowers to it and he wondered where the tents were now and he wondered who had stepped up to take Greyback’s place wearing perhaps his judge’s robes and his pins and insignia and bearing his carven ritual knife on a leather strap and perhaps even having braided Greyback’s hair into his own the way Greyback had braided into his own hair that of all his conquests until his mane was massive and heavy like the ruff of a lion asleep and bloody at the head of his pride.

He wanted to sit in the dust and never move again. Instead he climbed back on the pony with great effort and turned away from the old camp with difficulty and rode out to the North into the lowering of the day feeling the desert eyes still against his back.

 --

He came to the hotel in Van Horn past midnight so exhausted he thought he would topple from his horse. It was all he could do to brush her down in the stables and pour a trough of water and when he went into the dark cavernous hall and the dusty unmoving smell of it he felt he longed above all for sleep. Upstairs in the room at the end of the hall Sirius was in bed reading the red book of Whitman in the soft yellow lanternlight when Remus pushed in the door; upon sight of him he was on his feet instantly, setting the lantern rocking and spreading shadow, the door was slamming shut, and they were kissing. Sirius stripped him naked with a focused intent as though he were looking for something and he seemed near on frustrated when it was just Remus’s regular old ugly cut-up skin. A shock of fury bled though everything like dark ink down through the gold flush of it, twisting something tight in his belly. He shoved Sirius over and they tussled until they landed on the floor with a thump that rocked the lantern once more, Remus on top, blankets dragging from the bed and tangled about their ankles, and the two remaining mother-of-pearl buttons on Sirius’s shirt tore away and rolled over the hardwood with a skittering like teeth or marbles. “You want fuckin proof,” Remus said, shocked at the sound of his own voice. He had not spoken in two days and he could taste the screaming he’d been holding behind his teeth. “It’s just me. I swear to you.”

He thought he too wanted fucking proof but it was easier to talk like this, or not at all. He took Sirius inside himself as fast as he could stand and nearly choked on the sound that came out of his mouth. The hurt of it was like the sweet lye that had accompanied the coca leaves in Agua Zarca, astringent and bitter like licorice, and beneath him Sirius’s long spine was in a fine arch and all his wild hair fanned across the floor. “Can you f – ” Remus tried, but Sirius shoved his hips up and the words caught. “Can you f – can you feel – ”

“Yes,” Sirius told him; perhaps it was a lie, but he had Remus fixed direct in the eyes. His sweaty hands tracked up Remus’s thighs and Remus found he could hold nothing in his body still. Beneath his hands he felt the flexing knot of worry in Sirius’s shoulders and wanted to hit him, hard. Then something shifted and the world whited out; he could feel it on the edge of a knife stretching through his every muscle. “Yes,” Sirius said again, into the vast hushing brilliant silence, “Yes, yes, yes, yes.” The words sounded forced from him. His hand was open and spread wide against the small of Remus’s back.

He thought perhaps it would take him the rest of his damn life to divorce his own consciousness from everything it had been coupled to – to his dead mother, to Greyback and his boys, to the drug, to the Death Eaters, finally now to this. There was no himself inside any of it. There was only the horrific bliss inside this utter vacancy… With the last bit he had before it swept him over he lifted his eyes to Sirius’s and then there was no thought at all.


	12. XII.

XII.

Morning – News from the Black Empire – Missing Cavalry – Conversation on the Stoop – Betrayal – James’s Second Thoughts – the Noose Tightening – Remus’s Return – a Plan – Bitterness

 

In the morning Remus was gone and Sirius would have wondered if he had dreamed the whole encounter but for that he woke up on the floor with his trousers open, his cock out, and his shirt ripped. When he stood with effort and chanced a look in the mirror across the room he saw he had a spectacular bruise purpling against his upper chest in the shape of Remus’s mouth, teeth included. The window had been thrown open and the chill of the morning came in; it had begun to get cold in the nights on the high desert. Soon in the temperate regions Northwards the leaves would begin to change and fall.

He had not found out much from his mother and her associates beyond that she continued to hate him as much as she always had even if he was nominally in her employ. Her ire had not devolved into the old violence which Sirius suspected was mainly on account of he was bigger and stronger now than he had been at fifteen not to mention his father still had not shown his face. He had known to begin with that they were in cahoots with Riddle but their allegiance did run deeper than he’d suspected off the bat. The Malfoys owned a warehouse block in Houston where cotton crop from all over the Confederacy was staged; crews of Death Eaters and Riddle associates then would take it on speedy blockade-running steamships to the neutral ports in the Bahamas or they would port it overland to Guaymas with the Black family land providing another staging area not to mention reliable and unpatrolled passage over the border. Some of the product would be sold in Mexico, relayed about the desert on the backs of mules by battalions of Death Eaters. There wasn’t much Dumbledore and company could do with this information on account of Texas being Confederate territory and most Union incursions nipped off at the bud. The Union blockade was already watching Galveston and Corpus Christi like hawks or so they alleged but still they missed the dark steamships moving in the night laden with cargo.

Sirius had worked a week or two under his mother’s orders relaying British shipments of guns, received in Guaymas, transported overland, and staged in the Malfoys’ Houston warehouse, toward the besieged and occupied Mississippi and the warlands beyond. He and a few others transported the weapons in crates carried on the backs of fleabit donkeys through the Louisiana bayous by night to Lafayette, where another contingent would bring them further still into the Confederacy. Following the operation he had ridden back to West Texas near on covered head to toe in mosquito bites to make the third deal with Bellatrix at El Pensamiento. Of course Remus hadn’t been there and though Bellatrix had sent his best regards Sirius had ridden back up to his parents’ place in stony, desperate silence, crept down into the basement so as not to alert his mother to his presence, and killed two entire bottles of the finest wine he could find in the cellar. He’d woken up with a screaming hangover and had spent most of the day vomiting; upon discovery of this his mother had ordered him out, hence his arrival in relative shame back in Van Horn.

Still James and Peter at least had been happy to see him and Lily had begrudgingly allowed him to hold the baby, who had taken a tiny fistful of his hair again. He asked after Remus but they too had heard nothing. They explained over dinner that in the time he had been gone a contingent of the California cavalry had ridden out to fetch supplies in El Paso and had not returned. On account of it everyone’s lips and tempers were thin. Peter explained that he had been spending his days scouting solo in the surrounding hills but he had found no trace of the cavalry and no reliable place in which to hide all of the company – now numbering ten, plus the baby – should the worst come to pass.

Alone in the study Sirius relayed what he’d discovered to Dumbledore who heard him out whilst puffing on his corncob pipe then just said “Hmm.” He had expected a non-response because he knew he had uncovered nothing of import but still it was wounding in a way he had not foreseen. “That’ll be all, Mr. Black,” said Dumbledore. When he left his hands were trembling and he went out onto the desert and walked miles to the North along the deep scar of the wagonroad into the sharp spine of the mountains, numbly, hardly noticing as the sky darkened. He had done this as a child when all seemed lost. At midnight he had had to find his way back by the stars. James was sitting on the hotel stoop waiting for him with a glass of whiskey and a ball of hash and he watched as Sirius buried his face in his hands.

“He’s a ghost,” James said, offering him the bottle. “There’s no record of him ever having lived. No one even claims to have spoken to him aside from that Lestrange woman.” It was hardly reassuring. “What I mean is you can’t hardly figure nothin out if there ain’t nothin to be figured out.”

“There has to be somethin.”

“Maybe Moony’s got it,” James said, and something in Sirius’s gut twisted up painfully. “Ain’t a lost cause quite yet.”

Sirius had felt like screaming in James’s face – how did he know that Remus was even coming back at all? Perhaps they would send something like his ear or his thumb back when they figured out what he was doing. And if that happened they wouldn’t hardly have any time to mourn, would they, before they all died? And that was only the first of many horrific alternatives Sirius had entertained; the second was that Remus came back hooked again. What Bellatrix had told him kept echoing about in his head – “Watch him like a damn hawk.”

Two nights later Remus had indeed come back not missing any parts but Sirius had been near on too heartsick merely at the sight of him to discern as to his sobriety and had passed out directly after the proceedings in a heady cocktail of exhaustion, relief, and orgasm, like a teenager or an idiot. When he woke alone he feared Remus had ridden back out in advance of the dawn but when he ran downstairs barefoot and still wrestling into the last good shirt he had to his name he found Remus alone smoking one of his limp rollies on the hotel stoop watching at the haze spreading in the Northern mountains. When Sirius sat down as close as he dared Remus passed the cigarette over. He had a bruise on his jaw and a sunburn on his nose and he looked as though he’d not slept in weeks nor eaten in his life and he smiled weakly like he was sharing a secret but it belied nothing. “Good morning,” he said, and at least his voice sounded a little rounder.

“Good morning.”

He took a long drag when Sirius passed the cigarette back over. “Just spoke to Dumbledore and I gotta ride back out tonight,” he said, still looking away over the desert. “I’ll go with the Death Eaters to Monterrey.”

“Why Monterrey?”

“That’s the only run Bellatrix makes and she’s the only one of em purports to’ve ever spoken to Riddle,” Remus said. “Thusly Dumbledore thinks he’s likely there.” He passed the cigarette back to Sirius and their fingers brushed and his skin was very warm. “Stuck it out,” he said, “you’d be fuckin proud. Ain’t no fun ridin though the goddamn desert when you ain’t high.” As much it was a relief to hear Sirius was hardly sure he believed it. Not for the first time he wished there was a way to really know. “We did a run over to Tijuana then we met up with the rest in Guaymas where they ship the cotton out to these Frenchmen. Picked up a good deal of guns, ran back up to Coyame.” Sirius ground out the cigarette with his heel when the last spark of it burnt his fingers and Remus set about rolling them another. “What’d you and your mother get up to.”

“Didn’t have no fuckin tea party I can tell you that,” he said, and Remus laughed. “Those guns you got, we brought a prior shipment of the same on over from Houston to Lafayette through that damn bug-infested bayou. Not much aside from that. You know I had to make that deal with our Miss Lestrange last Monday.”

“She said you sent your regards.”

“Well I couldn’t damn well tell her to send you a fuckin kiss,” he said, and Remus smiled, with his teeth this time, then it faded. He stuck the finished cigarette in Sirius’s mouth and took out his matchbook and in the breeze he had to cup his hand around Sirius’s cheek to light it. It was like to be the most touching they would ever be able to do in public and still it was hardly enough. “Dumbledore says you really gotta to this run?” Sirius asked, through a puff of smoke.

“Course I really gotta do this fuckin run,” Remus said, frown in the bridge of his mouth, “The old man said five of the cavalry went missin not last week.”

“Somewhere between here and El Paso.”

“They’re fuckin close, Sirius, can’t you see the whites of their goddamn eyes? I don’t know how much longer we got. Gotta do what we can while we can, I suppose.” This time when he took the cigarette they met eyes and Sirius remembered a dreamlike flash of Remus the night previous hardly like anything inside the encyclopedia of his memory. He had recalled a vision he had had as a child from his bedroom window watching the clouds seething far away across the plain and the winds so brutal they dropped black tendrils of themselves down to the earth to rip at the substance of it. Remus searched his face like he would have looked at a book if he could read and Sirius wondered what he was looking for, and if he found it.

\-- 

Remus rode out to Coyame at the end of the day and immediately upon his departure Dumbledore called a meeting the others seemed to have been anticipating. “Mr. Lupin has ridden South to accompany a Death Eater legion en route to Monterrey,” he announced to the cavalry gathered in the study. Sirius wasn’t listening; he was watching the sunset through the window over the hills to the West. He could no longer see the speck of a rider to the South amidst the great juniper plain. “And I believe,” Dumbledore continued, “now is the time to consider that perhaps we have been betrayed.”

A stunned hush went about the room followed by murmurs and a kind of grotesque swallowed laugh from Snape and the realization went through Sirius like the slow seep of water through limestone, cold and bitter, that they were talking about Remus, who not an hour ago had been sharing cigarettes with him in bed in the room at the end of the hall upstairs. Lily spoke before he could – “What the fuck!”

“I know this may come as a shock, Mrs. Potter –”

“It doesn’t come as a fuckin shock cause it ain’t fuckin true,” she said. She had woken the baby with the volume of her voice and he began to whimper softly. “Tell me what fuckin evidence you got.”

“Him out there riding with goddamn Death Eaters for three weeks and in those three weeks Dearborn and the scout party just happen to evaporate off the face of the goddamn earth,” said Snape, sounding gleeful about it.

“Missin party could be Comanche,” said James, listing options on his fingers, “It could be Confederates, it could be scalphunters…”

“Severus has pointed out there would be signs if any of those fates befell our men,” Dumbledore said. He always spoke like he had this fucking sage wisdom, Sirius thought, and as though it were beyond reproach, when in reality he was sitting in a damn hotel eating bonbons while the rest did his filthy, dangerous work. Namely, while Sirius and Remus did his filthy, dangerous work. He had had no sage wisdom to offer when Remus was sick as a damn dog and he had had no brilliant alternatives to all their suicidal plans and thus why should Sirius trust a single thing he said in the slightest? Something red had descended into his vision and in the corner of it James was eyeing him, tense like he would arrest his charge, but then Dumbledore spoke again – “Concurrently, I don’t believe it’s fair that we leap to conclusions.”

“Once a hophead, always a hophead,” said Snape, ignoring him. “Every single one of em is the fuckin same. They love only that drug,” he said, and it seemed he was looking right at Sirius when he said it, “and that drug is the only thing to which they hold allegiance.”

“He’s been off it since July,” said James weakly.

“Off is relative,” Snape told them, “and impermanent.”

“You some kinda expert on his goddamn personality,” someone said roughly, and after a moment Sirius realized it had been himself. Dumbledore was looking at him with a kindly and resoundingly pitying expression Sirius wanted to slap off his face. “You don’t know him in the fuckin slightest.”

“I know his type,” Snape said, “I know he shot me. That’s all I need to fuckin know.”

In the silence that swept about the doubt crept in and Sirius heard Lily sniffing back tears and in her emotion the baby’s soft choked whimpers evolved into all-out wailing and Sirius could hardly blame him. He remembered around the noon hour of that day Remus had left their room to go down to the kitchen and fill the carafe of water and when he had come back he had had a soft smile on his face and Sirius and thought he was just happy. But how could he have been, with the noose tightening?

“Do any of _you_ – ” Snape said, sneering over the sound of the baby, “do any of you think you know him? Do any of you even fully trust him?”

 --

They decided from there to play it very safely and when Remus rode back they would derive some plan to keep him at the hotel and see if that made some kind of difference. In the interim Sirius was to ride back out to Comstock and see what he could hear from his mother and the Malfoys particularly involving information being spread amongst Riddle’s associates from within their enemies’ camps. Any parties going out in the desert for scouting or supplies were to ride in groups and carry flare guns. When Dumbledore dismissed them it was midnight and James and Peter followed Sirius out into the garden and the three of them walked there in silence beneath the shrinking moon until James said, loudly and with a strange finality, “Fuck.”

“I know,” said Peter.

“Fuck!” James shouted it into the night and it echoed and Sirius heard Peter’s sharp intake of breath. In the echo, the wild clambering echo over the desert, there was a thread of how Sirius himself felt. “God damn,” James said, softer this time, turning to them. His dark eyes were wet in the moonlight. “We should never’ve fuckin come down here,” he said.

“Don’t say that,” Sirius told him, though he’d been thinking it. He could tell James and Peter the same thing he’d been telling himself now for months – this is bigger than us. This is the war; this could win the Union the war. This could save thousands of lives; this could set thousands of enslaved men and women and children free. And thus all the horror done to me is of no import. “I’m sure it ain’t Moony,” he said, but he could taste the lie in it, and James cringed. “It could be anybody. Like – it could be Snape.”

“He’s been sitting in that goddamn study since we rode down here, Sirius,” said Peter quietly, “it ain’t him.”

James was onto something – “In fact the only two people with occasion to do it are the two of you, Sirius, and I know it ain’t you cause I know all your fuckin secrets. And no one knows all Moony’s.” The unsaid: even you don’t know all Moony’s. Did you suspect being inside somebody meant you also got inside their brain? Sirius wondered not for the first time if James and Peter knew. He could smell Remus still on himself, in his hair – lots of smoke, Remus. Cigarettes and mezcal.

The desert did this thing, he thought. It got in your blood and it became you, or perhaps it was the other way around. It was much like love, or otherwise it was like opium. It would make you walk and speak and it was full of nothing. It really just wanted more corpses to bury and when you walked in it you entered into this covenant with the landscape itself the substance of horror that you would offer up all your blood one day and thence it would swallow you whole. Or perhaps you had already died, and you were in hell. He understood it had been done to him long ago as he had been born into it. Remus though had made a lot of Faustian deals at a lot of crossroads in order to perpetuate his existence in the face of Events. Regardless now they seemed to be all winding near to the end of their goddamn contracts.

“What are we gonna do now,” James said, into the stars.

“I don’t know. Ride out.”

“We fuckin can’t,” said Peter.

“Neither can we stay here.”

“You think I don’t fuckin know that either? Pete, Sirius,” James said, defeat in his voice, “I got a fuckin kid.”

“I know, I’m his godfather,” Sirius said. James laughed bitterly and Peter slung an arm about his shoulders. They walked down together into the stretching light cast from the hotel windows. “We always figure somethin out, James.”

Unsaid: it was the four of them that always had. Still Sirius walked James up to his and Lily’s room and, not wanting to face neither her nor the bed in which he had slept now since June beside Remus, went on down to the bar where Peter had already snuck from behind it one of the final remaining bottles of whiskey.

 --

 It was chilly in the early morning of October 7th at El Pensamiento and Sirius was wearing a ripped-up old coat of Peter’s against it, which was too short in the sleeves and let the wind in at the ripped elbows. He had been certain his mother and the Malfoys would at best be remotely suspicious and at worst hang him by his heels from a tree when next they saw him. Instead they all greeted him with their customary cold, begrudging acceptance. Now it only remained to be seen whether Bellatrix and her Death Eater contingent would shoot him on sight or not. This would be the second-to-last deal they had product enough for and he drummed his fingers on the emblazoned barrels, watching as ever at the bluffs about. Not for the first time he wondered if his and Remus’s sighting of Riddle had been a collective wishful hallucination.

Bellatrix arrived this time wrapped about the shoulders in a pure black shawl of soft thin wool. As the Malfoys set the goods atop Macnair’s beastly pony Sirius gathered his bravery and spoke to her – “You oughta ride careful. We caught eye of a strange party out in the desert to the West of here.”

“State sheriff’s cavalry outta California riding about these parts,” she said, then she grinned. Her teeth seemed even yellower than when he had seen her smile last and the stretching of skin across her face made visible the very contour of her skull. “Not to worry. Anyone’ll sell what they know for the right price even Union boys… Good day, Sirius.”

They set up another meeting at the end of the month then rode out and Sirius did not even bother to feign toward Comstock once they were out of sight of the Death Eaters. He thought if he saw his mother’s smug face he would vomit and he wished they had indeed strung him by his heels the way he had heard Apache did with the iron bolt just through the flesh behind the thick tendon. That kind of pain would be cleansing and this kind was just rot – a very sore and spreading bruise the way it all was. When he rode three days later into Van Horn he found the complete cavalry in hysterics on account of the bodies they had found in the desert the morning previous – both Prewett brothers, and Fenwick – bearing the skull and snakes cut with knives into the skin of their bellies, distended in the heat. Fenwick’s head had been blown off with the flare gun leaving a long dark burn on the desert like the mark of lightning. The townspeople were riding out in droves with their valuables wrapped in canvas and tied on the backs of their donkeys like participants in some grand atavistic exodus and Lily was on the porch watching them, red hair blowing in the desert wind, and Remus was still not back. 

 --

In the morning Sirius woke with the dawn to find Remus sitting on the opposite bed smoking. The smoke hung in the still room with the light catching in it like some spirit and within it Remus manifest thinner still than he had looked in September, ridden ragged, grey eyes cold. It was like looking at him had been before he’d quit at all, equal parts fear and shock and a screaming desire – “Sleeping beauty,” Remus said, voice rough. His smile was a quick bitter flash but he came to Sirius’s side and sat on the bed and let Sirius inch his hand up under the hem of his shirt in search of whatever hypothetical evidence. He was sweaty from riding, skin warm, he smelled good; he felt under Sirius’s hand like almost the same person, bones and skin and will to live alone. They hardly spoke at all and when Sirius bore Remus down against the wool blanket he felt in the taut muscles beneath him just the barest edge of resistance, an arch in the small of the back, which calmed infinitesimally when he mouthed at the point of pulse in Remus’s long sunburnt neck.

“I can’t stop thinking,” he said, or perhaps he was just imagining it, or perhaps he was still dreaming, “whenever you’re gone, if I had you back, what I’d do – ”

It must have been aloud because Remus said “Like what.” His hand wrapped Sirius’s upper chest against his heartbeat with his thumb’s sharp fingernail against a nipple and looking down at him and the ragged white scar across his face and the birthmarks inside his neck Sirius thought, it cannot possibly be him because if it were him I would know; I would see it now.

“Where I would touch you,” he said, to stop thinking. “And how, and with what, and for how long.” Remus’s hand slid over his belly and lower and he shifted into the touch and looked up into Remus’s mouth, which was open, soft red, bruised a little – he had not relaxed the arch yet out of his back. “Kiss you all over,” Sirius said, against the shell of Remus’s ear now, “until you come apart – ”

Until, he was thinking, all your secrets came out, until you were revealed to me, until I could see through you like talc stone and be sure of it.

When he pulled back in the soft midday autumn light through the window Remus bent his knees up and reached for Sirius with just his eyes. Down the hall the baby was crying.

 --

“This needs to end,” Lily was saying, bouncing the baby on her lap. She had summoned Remus and Sirius to sit with her and James and Peter for dinner in the back corner of the hotel restaurant. Before Remus’s arrival they had planned this conversation under hypothetical circumstances with approval from Dumbledore. “Ain’t nothin happenin but you two bein just about deputies for your own mortal enemies.”

“Yes ma’am,” Remus said softly into his coffee.

“Clearly neither of us are any closer to Riddle and probably we could do this years and never be,” Sirius told her.

“They oughta get you each a cabin in the Sierras on a hundred acres after this,” Lily said, and she gave James and Peter each a look. The baby cooed and grabbed at a scrap of tortilla on her plate and mashed it against his mouth and Remus smiled tiredly to see it. “And we oughta figure out a way to make some kinda stand. Like a kinda all or nothin stand. Then we run it by the rest of em. Right now we just at some kinda goddamn chess-game stalemate.”

“You were a man you’d be a general in the Union army right about now Lily,” said Sirius.

“If I were a man I never woulda set eye on a single one of ya which come to think of it might be a fuckin improvement.”

“Alright,” Remus said, “So we only seen Riddle the once on the bluff in El Pensamiente when we made that first big deal.”

“Put up another big deal and have another party scout about?” This from Peter.

“Won’t have no goods left after this one,” Sirius reminded him.

“We could just on and raid Coyame,” said James.

“It’d be like cuttin the weed off at the base of it but you still got the root.”

“Not to mention that goddamn town’s creepy as all fuck, and there’s fuckin seven of us.”

“Moony,” said Lily, “you got any knowledge as to their smuggling routes?”

“Some,” Remus said, running his finger about the rim of his coffee mug. He had propped his temple up in his hand and looked supremely tired either from riding throughout the night previous or because Sirius had kept him up all day and yet had not managed to winnow out any secrets or in fact anything he didn’t already know. “The drugs we sell ‘em go all over but South mostly to Mexico City where they’re passed off and traded. The cotton out of Dixie they bring to Guaymas and ship it out to Europe. That’s primarily where the money comes from.”

“Would Riddle accompany any shipments?” Peter asked.

“Bellatrix said she vetted even Jeff Davis himself before he got in the room with Riddle,” Sirius said.

“That woman’s a hophead succubus out of hell,” said Lily, “you can’t trust a goddamn thing she says. No offense meant to you Moony.”

“None taken,” said Remus, though he’d bristled.

“Moral of the story is I doubt he’d accompany any shipments on account of – well, it’s like, does General Lee actually fight in any battles?”

“The way I understand it seems nothin’s important enough for him to do personal,” Remus said.

“D’you think anything could be?” Lily asked.

Remus paused. “I don’t know. Bellatrix only goes to Monterrey on runs so Dumbledore and I bet Riddle was camped out there but all the trade we did was peanuts. Not to mention we were all with Bellatrix day and night, didn’t once see her slip off.”

“She could’ve just not seen him this time particular,” said Peter.

“Maybe,” Remus said. “I’d go again with her but we ain’t got much time.”

“We theoretically could ride out and get more.” This from Lily, though it was clearly her last idea. 

“Ain’t no guarantee we’d come back in one damn piece, is the thing,” Sirius said. “We oughta go out kicking.”

“Telegram Sacramento and fuckin Washington and tell em to send a contingent to Monterrey to look for Riddle,” James said. “Then we ride on down and rig a bomb up in the saloon in Coyame. High tail it the fuck on out to the Northeast, they won’t expect it. Go out with a literal goddamn bang.”

“Fuckin suicide mission,” said Peter coldly, staunchly refusing to meet any of their eyes. It had always seemed as though he did not comprehend the gravity of this territory the way Sirius and Remus did.

Remus had no patience for it. “Right, Pete, so Sirius and I’ll do it, like usual.” He was trying to fix Peter in the eye and even when he wouldn’t meet the gaze Remus leveled one of his blandest and most chilling smiles. “Anyone else have any other ideas?”

 --

James told Dumbledore what they’d devised and plans were put in motion to set up the bomb on November 2nd, All Soul’s Day, when Remus thought a host of Death Eaters and accomplices would gather in Coyame to celebrate the closing of the Day of the Dead. They agreed in secret that at the last minute James would take Remus’s place riding Southerly with Sirius to deploy it. Snape had been consigned to build the thing amidst much displeased muttering and everyone was tasked with not letting Remus out of their sights. He had picked up on something being wrong rather quickly from the way everyone stopped talking when he came in the room as though he were a kid in over his head but he would not speak with Sirius about it and instead they would walk together in silence on the desert or sneak away together upstairs and fuck, it being after all the final means of communication left to them, because they could tell each other nothing. They would have to leave Texas one day very soon perhaps with nothing having been accomplished but for the setting of suspicion’s guillotine. They would ride up North and perhaps they would never speak again with even the speaking having been taken away by the desert and eventually the blade would fall.

Sirius did not recall that he would have to ride out presently to make the final deal with Bellatrix until Dumbledore and Peter brought into the study from wherever they had stowed them the two remaining barrels of powdered morphine. He had been near the end of the red book of Whitman and Remus was cross-legged on the floor cleaning his gun for the thousandth time in naught but a few days. James was sitting in the sun in an armchair beside them with the baby, who was watching at the brightness of a string of flowers and grasses Lily had tied with twine into something appearing not unlike a voodoo doll.

Sirius hugged James goodbye in the study and the baby pulled his hair. He shook hands with Peter and Dumbledore and he could feel four pairs of eyes on his back when he and Remus went for the door. In the stable they rigged the barrels astride his pony without speaking and Remus did not even saddle his wild red. “You don’t have to fuckin look expectant,” he said, watching at the desert out the stable door. “I know I ain’t comin with ya.”

“Well it ain’t what I want.”

“None of this ain’t what nobody wants, Sirius.” He spat in the dust. “Heaven knows I want you to treat me like a fuckin sane adult and I want you to trust me and I just want you. And I got none of the fuckin above.” 

God, and Sirius knew he had just one out of three going for him and there was no getting around it. “You do have me.”

It sounded so feeble Remus’s eye twitched. “No I don’t,” he said. His eyes were cold blunt gunmetal. “I don’t fuckin lie to you so you shouldn’t fuckin lie to me.”

A very cold fist tightened around his chest when Remus shook his hand. He wondered as he rode out what the thing was about himself that made near on everyone around him sick. Perhaps it was the desert thing, the great isolator, calling and calling and again calling. That thing got in every little crack like water freezing and unfreezing and then it broke everything away. His parents and his brother and Dumbledore and now Remus; perhaps soon it would be Peter and James and Lily. He thought, I’ll ride til I fuckin die. I’ll ride, I’ll do the trade, I’ll ride again, I’ll lay the bomb alone. Perhaps beyond the surface of death itself there’ll be some drop of affection waiting like ambrosia for me.


	13. XIII.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> as a general warning, the violence is pretty serious from here on out.

XIII.

Bitterness Cont. – Lily Cold – Sugar Skulls – Awaiting the Prodigal – Demon Cavalry – Realization – Alone in the Hotel – the Stand – a Wolf on the Stairs – Legion of Horribles – Wounded – Tom Riddle – Judgment – Desperado

 

Remus stood in the door of the stables and watched Sirius ride out Westerly until the black mark of him disappeared into the haze amidst the junipers. He felt very like some cuckolded prairie wife, and he spat in the dust. It was clear what they all believed from the way they had all come to stop conversing when he walked in the room. He was hardly used to being trusted but it seemed in the past few months up until his return from Monterrey he’d been sorely spoiled – now that he knew what the opposite was like the loneliness seemed near impossible to bear. In the past he’d had a crutch for it; now it was like crawling…

It was hardly worth keeping up the world like this, he thought, and he went back up into the hotel. In the conference room James and Dumbledore were talking hushedly and when they saw him in the door they quieted. He walked on and slowly up the creaking stairs. If they were all so sure he had relapsed perhaps he should just get on with it and if they were all so sure he was the traitor perhaps he ought to just ride out to spare them the concern. In El Paso they would certainly have teahouses and in Galveston they would have morphine for the thieving and it would not matter if he did not make it there.

When he went into the room his heart twisted at the smell of Sirius in it and he had to close the door again. In the hall he could hear Lily singing to the baby and it twisted still tighter. He went back out into the heat and walked on the desert until nightfall trying as he had for years to feel down into the very root of it at the core of the world in search of his own origin there.

\-- 

The next morning he went to Lily’s room with coffee for the both of them and sat on the floor by the crib where he had sat when she had given birth. She did not allow him to hold the baby though he asked to and they spoke for a while about things of no consequence. She did not ask him about Sirius which was just as well because he did not want to talk about Sirius. He tried to tell her, it’s not me. It is not me because I love you all; how could it be me? But he knew she would be unlike to believe him and it would only hurt. “You and James and Harry should ride out,” he said. She looked at him as though he were crazy. When he left he could feel that look still against his back.

He scouted about the desert alone for days on foot or astride the wild red pony and he ate meals with James in silence or in the room alone and afterwards he lay in the dark and thought of Sirius. Sirius who at the last had offered to let Remus fuck him and Remus had been so shocked he declined though he had in fact thought of it, often, and vividly. It seemed to be the last gasp of Sirius’s effort to entice Remus with sex into saying something, but of course everything Sirius wanted to hear would be a lie, and all the truth he would not believe; it would only serve to make him more suspicious still. “Trust me” had not worked all those months ago; what else would? God, everything was so broken but there was nothing else to do except await the falling of the blade.

 --

Dumbledore had somehow procured sugar skulls he distributed amongst the cavalry on Halloween morning for all them to eat with their coffee. No one spoke to Remus and after breakfast he went upstairs and cleaned his gun for possibly the millionth time in a week. He knew when Sirius rode back that night or the morning following he would be barred from leaving with him for Coyame but still some dream of it filled his mind, soft as lace – riding Southerly beside Sirius as they had ridden together all those months previous before everything, before all the horror and the vast complication, riding, finally, at long last, into the ultimate consummation of death. Regardless before Sirius rode out again they would certainly have a chance to fuck and it would be the kind of ruthless fucking you would still feel afterward for days. Likely it would be the last time and there would be no one else for him again. The one respite in it was that he likely would not live much longer anyway.

He walked on the desert watching at the East and then he sat on the porch in the fading of the afternoon sipping a glass of mezcal and watching for a rider on the horizon but there was nothing, and nothing, and still nothing. Finally he went upstairs to pack his things in case they had changed their minds, though he knew rationally they had not. The false hope was like its own drug, almost silvery and sweet enough to gloss the real world over. The afternoon spread soft white light through the window over the floorboards and Remus chanced another look to the East for a rider but the dust cloud he caught eye of with an initial leap in his heart was to the South and too large to be Sirius.

Panic lanced through his gut like ice and he found his spyglass amidst his things and peered through the eye toward the cloud of dust where he saw riding on the roiling head of it like the spume of some towering rogue wave at least thirty hooded figures upon black horses. In the gritty blur of the dust he could make out the Death Eaters’ silvery war decorations and their elaborate armaments, all refracting metallic in the bloody sunset light. Remus’s hands were trembling too violently to hold the glass steady enough to catch much detail but he saw the demon cavalry were riding upward at a clip through the valley and he estimated the cloud of dust would be upon them now in a quarter of an hour.

Following the initial panic was a calm, abstract serenity, in which he thought, Sirius. The full horror of it unfolded into a fist about his stomach and he turned away from the window to swallow the bile that had risen, burning, into his mouth. It was purely wishful that he had not entertained the notion previously but now of course with the demon cavalry riding down upon the hotel and Sirius alone among the Californian contingent elsewhere it certainly seemed obvious. Who else could it ever have been? Who else had occasion?

Sirius who had wanted him for years. Sirius who had sat with him when he was ill.

He must have been complete stone, Remus thought, or he must have such fickle moods perhaps it was something sick in his brain. Sirius wanted to be loved so badly but he was frightened to do it himself. He was so frightened to bind his soul to another as if that weren’t the only way it could be done. And meanwhile he had gotten Remus all tied up so tightly he could never be undone again. He had never been so naked in front of anyone in his life and thinking of it the shame was red-hot, searing, like a cattle brand. There was probably a mark left – he knew – under his clothes, everywhere Sirius had ever touched, rotting, turning black – and he could feel it there, crawling between the skin and the grist of him. Spreading, like some sick mold, because – God – Sirius had touched everywhere, because Remus had asked him to. He had had Remus every way he wanted and Remus had begged him for it.

The thing woke up and began circling and it howled up from his gut into his brain. Remus, it said, poor sweet boy. I tried to warn you but you cast me out. You fancied your own inexpert conception of reality though you knew better in your heart. You thought you loved him better than you ever loved me but I knew always you would come crawling back. You’ll never leave me, it said, because I am the only thing you have ever valued. And you value me because I am the only thing keeping you from shit. Clearly every decision you’ve made in my absence has contributed only to your own humiliation. Only he and I have ever near on killed you with pleasure and now you know only I ever meant it because you were always shit under his fuckin heel. Really you must admit I’ve never made such a right fucking fool of you. Really you must admit all this is not all that different from –

He said aloud in a raw voice that embarrassed him to hear – “Stop.”

“Stop what?” said a voice from the doorway. Remus spun and jumped two feet but James did not wait for an answer. Instead he came to join Remus at the window. “Judgment at hand, Moony.”

“Yessir.”

They went out together shutting the door behind them and walked down the hall. When Remus peeked in the door of Lily and James’s room she was in there rocking the baby’s crib with her foot whilst she loaded her gun. The piece was rather bigger than the one he remembered from her desk drawer in Genoa. When she saw him she gave him a pained half-smile that suggested she had drawn the same conclusion he had. In it, a deep well of sorry. He wanted more than anything to sit with her the way he had long ago. Sometimes she had let him lie in her bed and sleep it off and she would slip away from working downstairs and stonedly practice these shaky ballet steps about the room, lace twirling. She would have something wise to tell him when he had gathered his wits again about himself. She would say, “You can’t erase any of that stuff no matter how you try. It makes you how you are and you’re good how you are.” Then she would bring him scrambled eggs with smoked meat. He would climb down the drainpipe when she brought in clients.

Remus and James combed the hotel and found only Peter, who was in the bar looking out from behind the heavy velvet curtains with his long spyglass. “Evening gents,” he said, customary dry humor clearly forced.

“You seen Dumbledore?” James asked, “even Snape?”

“Just rode out,” Peter said, passing the spyglass to Remus. Indeed once he’d hauled his sight from the cloud of dust about the legion of Death Eaters he could see Dumbledore’s navy tails and white beard blowing from the back of his pony; he and another figure rode together Westerly. A few of the Death Eater cavalry had ridden off to follow them, casting their own dust up, and Remus thought he recognized Macnair’s beastly horse among them. He passed the spyglass back to Peter who caught his eyes for a moment. “Sirius, then,” Peter said tonelessly.

“Appears that way,” said James tightly after a moment, because Remus could not speak.

“Goddamn, we thought it was you, Moony,” Peter said, tactless as ever. “Dreadfully fuckin sorry.”

“It don’t fuckin matter.” Of course, nothing did. “How’re we gonna go about this?”

“Go about what?” This from James. Something else clenched in his gut – he had never imagined how to talk fucking sense into these two without Sirius.

“Makin a fuckin stand, you daft motherfuckers.” They looked at each other, eyes wide, then at him. “We oughta hold as many of em off as we can. Protect the woman and child.”

“I’ll hide outside; get em as they come in the door,” said Peter. Remus did not have the time nor the emotional fortitude to be impressed by his display of relative bravery.

“James, you go on upstairs with your wife and son and I’ll take the stairs.”

“Ain’t no place to hide on the stairs,” said James. Remus could feel it as the realization dawned on James slowly. He himself had known for months now they would not survive this – there was a threshold between living and dying and he’d come close to it before. He’d been hovering now in the vicinity since he’d taken that dose with Greyback and now he could truly see it, and the soft black veil above it, and the darkness beyond.

He had to stop thinking. “Peter,” he said, ignoring James, “that way, if you need help, I’ll be right in the window.”

“You’re a damn crackshot, Moony, I’m gonna fuckin need it.”

“Why don’t we just ride out?” James asked.

“Theoretically we could,” Remus said, “we’d have to go now…”

“Easier to make a stand here, though,” said Peter, “We know the building and there’s places to hide.”

“Near on certain death either way,” Remus said to James. He still looked like he would not believe it and Remus wanted to hit him until he did. “If ever you hear a lull in the gunfire try and get Lily and Harry out. You might be able to sneak out to the stables if Pete and I can distract em. Alright?”

“Alright,” said Peter, then begrudgingly James echoed them. He embraced them both; Peter smelled like horse and James like baby shit but he did not want to let either of them go because letting them go would mean letting himself back into his own mind and the roaring within. Still they parted ways; Peter went for the door and slipped out into the golden light. It shut heavily behind him with a severing finality and Remus knew with a sinking coldness in his heart he would never see Peter alive again.

On the stairs James hugged Remus again, tighter and for longer, the both of them rocking back and forth on their feet as though they were dancing, and when he drew away he looked Remus direct in the eyes. “I’m so sorry,” he said. He was trying to tell Remus what he was sorry for every way except saying it aloud. Of course, how could it be vocalized?

“It’s alright. I’m sorry too.” Outside he could hear the hoofbeats, or it was the devil coming forth – when he looked, the dust cloud was near upon them. His heart was pounding and the thing howling and his mind roaring and he watched James press the liquid from his eyes. “Go for the stable if you can,” he told James. “Ride as hard as you can manage – go Northeast, like you said.”

“Alright,” said James.

“Give Lily a kiss from me.”

“I will,” James said, “Moony, see you after.”

It was like the last remaining fragment of his heart shattered to dust and left in the wreckage of it only the howling. “Yeah, James, see you after.”

He watched James disappear up the stairs and down the hall and then he watched at the dust cloud in the window. It was like the horrible fog of dread and humiliation in his brain made manifest and he had to focus and focus his concentration out of it. He knew what he had to make himself again. It had been years since he’d been in any kind of real gunfight and it required a focused blankness of mind he wasn’t sure he’d never before attempted sober. After a few moments he checked his gun again to stop thinking. He had the six-shooter and a box of ammunition in his jeans pocket and then he had his pocketknife in the leather holster; that was it. At least the box of ammo was full; it rattled like a case of pills.

He fit himself into a corner of the landing. From here he could see a glimpse into the entrance hall and a peek out the window; Peter had hidden himself well in the garden by the grand doors but Remus could see a wisp of his hair. He could hear his heartbeat in his ears and wondered at it – how could it pound so aggressively when it hurt so badly? At least he would be dead soon, and probably there was nothing there. Probably it was as soft and warm and dark as he had seen the occasions he had overdosed and in it there was no knowledge and no memory and thus there was no pain and there was no guilt. There was only the absolute pure wild pleasure of no feeling at all. And if it had indeed been false and he had to explain his deeds to some mediator between his soul and afterlife then it would have to be one heartless bastard who would not take some kind of pity, and even hell would be better than this.

He thought he hardly believed in God because of all that had happened but if he met God he would say, I became this person because of what you took away and what you gave me to cling to in the place of it. The desert, and opium, and my gun. He nearly laughed aloud.

The horses were screaming in the road and Remus looked out the window and caught eye of them. Those Death Eaters at the front of the cavalry did not stop but rode their wild black ponies up the stoop to rear and kick at the door itself and Remus felt the whole building shake, then he heard the door swing open. Portraits fell from the walls and glass shattered. When he lifted his gun and shut the action with a soft click his mind cleared out the way it did. In the blankness it became again like target shooting. His first gun he had stolen from his father. When he was very young he would use it to kill them dinner which his father would hardly eat. He had taught himself to shoot with accuracy so the animals would die quickly; he couldn’t bear to see them lying in blood, eyes rolling white at him in fear and pain.

Greyback had been quite impressed. You move like a wolf, Remus, he had said. Long legs, sinews – silent – a little hunter. My little hunter, Remus. He told Remus the legend that went with his name as though he had not heard it before. His hand was very heavy at the nape of Remus’s neck, then –

One, two, three shots off when they came about the corner unto the stairs. In their thick black cloaks they fell silently but for the clinking of the metallic trinkets they wore. He sat back and loaded three more bullets into the chamber, hands unshaking. He had bitten his fingernails past the quick and they were bleeding around the beds of them. More gunfire outside – he could hear a horse whinny in fear.

He heard movement in the lower hallway and turned to it and fired twice through the carven ballusters, then ducked away quickly – he felt the air cut and above his head the wall burst a chink of red adobe dust. Two more shots, and something fell. He reloaded once more – gunfire was general now outside and he thought he heard a scream but when he chanced a look the windowpane directly to his left burst, struck by a bullet – it had been fired by the Death Eater on the stairs beneath him – and Remus caught him in the shoulder, then the chest. Another rode his pony crashing through the wood floors around the bend from the doorway and Remus shot it in the belly; it bucked and tossed its rider then fell and crushed him.

He reloaded the gun again. This time in the gunfire outside he was sure he heard a scream – his heart skipped through the adrenaline; it was certainly Peter. He could not chance a look through the window now.

He went to the top of the stairs and leant over the railing and caught them from above when they came up in search of him, some on their horses still, all wearing trophies – one wore a full desiccated penis about the neck of his robes, mummified and blackened by sun. One wore a human heart like Sirius had, but on a golden strand. They wore the silver and turquoise chestpieces of the Pueblos and they wore marigolds for the holiday and candy skulls upon strings and necklaces of ears and thumbs and toes connected with bronze rings. They wore ancient armor filigreed with floral patterns and one wore a woman’s brassiere. The horses were draped with thieved blankets, bloody with battle use, and they wore trophies of their own; their manes were braided with human hair and their hooves were bloody and they were all branded about the flanks with the mark of the skull and snakes.

Something came through the window and buzzed directly beneath Remus’s ear like an insect and hit the wall behind him with a thunk and another cloud of adobe plaster. He snuck around the wall and ducked to reload and noticed he was bleeding; the bullet must have grazed his jaw. The box of bullets was empty but the gun was full which meant he had six bullets left before he would have to improvise.

It was then he heard a scream from down the hallway – Lily – and he ran towards it. He stepped over James in the door. There was a Death Eater in the broken window, but Lily had shot him in the chest. Remus watched him fall with a billowing of black robes into the blue. Behind the shifting shadow in the window the sun perched in the hem of the West sinking and spreading gold.

The baby was screaming from the crib in the corner. Remus knelt and pressed his fingers to the soft part beneath James’s jaw for no reason; he’d been shot in the back of the head. When he looked up Lily was stony-faced. Together they moved the corpse tenderly from the door. The blood it trailed was dark and there were gray threads of brains in it; Remus swallowed bile.

Lily had three bullets left in her gun. Remus had six. She stood before the crib and he by the door, watching down the hall.

Bullets tore into the wooden door shattering splinters – Remus fired – five.

“Moony,” Lily said sharply. She was watching out the window and her eyes were swollen wide. “Moony – Peter –”

In the blue haze of gunsmoke, a shadow in the hall – four.

“I already know,” he said.

Now in the darkness a writhing mass of shadows – three, two.

He did not see who shot him nor did he feel the pain at first but rather the force of it as though something had pulled him back, hard, by the shoulder. Then he smelled the blood, then he felt it. The pain hammered through then stilled to numbness. He did not dare look but he could sense the finality; he could feel his heartbeat in it. The blood dripped over his fingers onto the floor like candlewax. A deep silence echoed in his mind, cut by screaming and by gunfire. Jostling in the doorway were several black blurs with the metal pieces of their weapons refracting goldenly the sunset in the West through the open window.

Over his shoulder someone managed to squeeze three shots off into the cluster at the door before they fell and present in the sound of their falling, the baby screaming and screaming from his crib.

The ceiling was stained with ash and water and blood spread about the floor and he could feel the heat of it against his back. He did not remember falling. All the fire had ceased. The ceiling – he was watching at the ceiling while Sirius – he was watching at the ceiling and his arm was about Sirius’ shoulders – and Sirius told him God, Remus, you’re so good, God – Remus – and he could feel himself slipping, and he thought – please –

They hauled him up and the world spun when it righted. About him they smelled like poppy tea.

 _Open your mouth up. Come on_.

He would have asked for it if he could’ve managed to put the words into his mouth; he was certain it alone would mute the roaring. In the hold of it everything would melt and leave behind itself nothing – God, pure nothing. No thought, no truth. No certainty.

Now in the doorway was a pale man in a suit of fine grey linen and in the band of his hat he wore a single bright marigold. His nose had been cut long ago and his eyes were red and his mouth twisted. The lips hardly were. Accompanying him were an elite of his legion who had unhooded upon the sight of someone familiar. They wore about their necks the looted treasures of their conquests and they were smiling with blood about their teeth and their eyes had gone black with the drug and the thrill of killing.

The pale man took Remus by the arm and pressed his thumb tight into the wound and squeezed. It was as though his flesh itself were salt. The sickly yellow haze of pain pulled over his eyes like a stretch of wool and in it he thought he could feel within himself, God, the rifleball, butted up tight and close against the bone – the splinter running through it, like a webbing crack in a porcelain dish.  The pale man showed a few black teeth to feel his hold on consciousness waver. “Here you are,” he said when he let go. His voice was a cold rasp like a snake over stone. “The last lone wolf.”

Still the blood, over his fingers, onto the floor, loose in his hand, tracing over in rivulets, itself too like someone’s touch.

“It’s a pity he already cut your face,” said the pale man, “and it’s also a pity you’ve clearly learned nothing from it.” He looked over Remus with a removed appraisal. His word was law amongst his cavalry and they listened as though to gospel. “I sense I do not need to remind you that you drew a contract when you entered my roundabout employ, a figurative one, of course, because you cannot write. In this corner – my corner – of the world one does not break a contract without repercussion as you would do well to absorb. I will tolerate hopheads, boy; I will tolerate reformed Unionists, I will even tolerate fuckin queers, provided they keep their filth to their goddamned selves. But I will not tolerate double-crossers and you have proven yourself young sir one hell of a double-crosser. You can’t quit none of this, son, you’d do well to learn. Not without leaving a mark.”

He took Remus’s wounded arm by the wrist and removed a bloody knife from a leather sheaf at his belt and pressed the sharpened red blade of it into the soft web between Remus’s palm and thumb. The baby was screaming and screaming with the grief and the blood and the horror and around the desert sucked the blood up in the heat and still he could feel the hunger, because it was like his own. Only the desperate hunger, foremost even above pain. It was for death, the yearning, and it would not come, it would not come, it would not come, still it would not come. It was not unlike before. At the last he thought of Sirius and behind the great sheaf of hurt it all focused – 

When those flanking him let go his strength gave out and he fell to his knees. The wound was clean and straight and clinical; it had surely been practiced. When Remus spat blood at Tom Riddle’s feet he found he had bitten through his tongue. The red eyes met his amidst the blur of faces above, near slaked of their bloodthirst, jittering with excitement to loot the corpses, and the butt of someone’s gun struck hard across his face.

As the world gathered again from the spread of sparks it had been cast into he understood they would leave him and the baby to die in that room. Certainly he would faint in the bloodloss before they even set the hotel afire. They turned and left the room and he allowed himself two breaths, then he stood. Everything swam; his heart was pounding like a war drum. He could not look at Lily’s face. The blood spread against the chest of her white shirt like a red flower and she was still. With the arm he could still feel he lifted the baby from his crib. He could not make his voice work beyond a croak from screaming. “It’s me,” he whispered, “It’s me, just me.”

He crouched and bound his arm and his hand in strips of fabric torn from the bedsheets. There was one bullet in the chamber of his gun.


	14. XIV.

XIV.

the Day of the Dead – the Final Deal – Beyond Fear – the Hotel Burning – “Send Him My Love” – Riddle and the Traitor – Three Bullets to His Name – the Shot – His Horse Killed – Both Wounded – Suspicion and Surety – Sunset – Desperado

 

Sirius rode to Marathon and from the post office there wired the Malfoys in La Pryor and at noon in several days time they met on his mother’s land in Comstock as they had met every three weeks now since the beginning of that summer. He went inside and knelt in the parlor and kissed his mother’s ring. He did not expect ever to see her again and she knew it. The slave girls were in the hallway watching and whispering in their own language to one another and when he went by they pressed on him a painted silver flask of something, white dog whiskey from a sniff of it.

It was a feeling, he thought, like you were evading pursuit in a slot and it was narrowing. If they did not know about him they considered him a trusted ally and would expect more trade and if they did know they likely still just needed the drugs. Regardless he was in for it when the supply dried up and considering strapped to his pony now was the last of it he suspected he was running headlong into a goddamn wall.

Outside the sun was high and blinding. They rode South directly over the river. Few dared live in the small adobe villages of that territory but them that did had begun decorating in welcome to La Calavera Catrina with vivid Mexican marigolds screaming orange against the blue sky and the pale desert. In the graveyards he passed they had begun to set up the altars about the breaking stones with flowers and mezcal and candies. All about were death’s heads. From the doorways children eyed the riders then disappeared into the darkness. He managed a few scant hours of sleep just before dawn and dreamt of Remus as had become customary and woke when the sun hit the world with the ghost of some raging guilt violent inside his mind. Narcissa was watching him but when he met her eyes she looked away.

Bellatrix and them were waiting at El Pensamiento. In advance of the holiday some had decorated their cloaks and their ponies with skulls and bright flowers in riotous compliment with their jewelry of bones and flesh and Bellatrix herself looked much like La Catrina as she always did, bones and flesh herself, sporting a crown of marigolds. She smiled when she dismounted and advanced upon Sirius like death from the tombs, trailing her black shawl, as Lucius took the barrels of morphine to secure them to Macnair’s pony.

“Happy Halloween,” she said, shaking his hand. “Where’s our Lupin?”

“Rode on up North to secure the next load,” Sirius lied, feeling like Bellatrix could look inside his skull. “Not sure how long he’ll be. I’ll wire you when we’ve figured out another shipment.”

“Send him my love,” she said. She had not shifted her face from that smile and Sirius knew when he turned from her he would still see it emblazoned across the surface of his mind. There was a knowledge in the smile he would not allow himself to think about. When she passed him the bag of gold her cold fingers brushed his palm. “I expect we will see each other rather sooner than you think.”

\-- 

Sirius rode West, beyond fear. He felt he tread upon death itself and would soon fall through. It would make the passage easier now the complete desert had been prepared for the arrival of its lost souls. He expected he would be followed and rode circuitous on account of it, checking back and listening to the ground when he could, but he was alone in the vast pale haze. On the second day he and his pony lay in the dust and watched an Apache war party ride hard out to the West and heard their war cries tinny in the vast bowl of that landscape and vivid across the silence. They were going to Sonora perhaps to join Cochise.

In the morning of All Hallow’s Eve he rode into the mountains due East of Van Horn and knew he would be back at the hotel by sunset. He ached from riding and sleeping rough on the desert and longed above all for a bed and a square meal even if potentially both would be his last and he allowed the fantasy to devolve considerably into the detailed and impossible, which included mole enchiladas and good whiskey and afterwards making love to Remus with such tender prowess he was induced to confess his every sin – but, God, he had been trying that since the beginning, and he knew the cook woman had sensibly fled to El Paso, and he and James had killed the last bottle of the passable whiskey. Meaning he was likely to die with a belly full of beans and tequila high on the memory of one final mostly-clothed silent desperate fuck with someone he thought he loved, but could not bring himself to trust. It seemed fucked-up and fitting.

Of course it came as very little surprise to him when around the late afternoon of that day he rode to the top of a rise and saw across the falling hills to the town in the valley below where the hotel was burning. The burning of it spiraled a thick black strand into the sky and reaching orange-golden flames traced upon the adobe. In the undulating watery shadow cast by the fire upon the ground a contingent of black-hooded cavalry on horseback marshaled in a diminished group. The sun sat high above it all a white cigarette burn in the blue casting the world in what seemed theatrical shadow and Sirius spurred his pony hard. He knew it would take him another hour or more to get down there on account of the roughness of the territory between but still he spurred her until she ran.

Bellatrix’s voice was in his head – “Send him my love.”

He must have been far gone in it – the thrill of the sex – for him to have believed in his heart someone raised by wolves could grow up to be anything other. The pain was gone even as his horse pounded over the terrain jostling sore muscles at every stride and it had been replaced completely by this hot red curtain like all the blood inside his brain shoving into his eyes. Perhaps Remus had been in this since before they met in Genoa and perhaps it had been his agenda all along. Why else had anyone ever claimed to love him if not to use it? Perhaps Remus would have said to Bellatrix or perhaps to Riddle even, save that one if you can, he’s an alright fuck and a crack shot. He can be induced. He can be hauled about by his heart or his cock if necessary. Or perhaps Remus would not have said anything at all and instead he would have offered up all their lives in exchange for death. That thing, itself death inside this world, and once you touched it you could never come away. That thing was God or worse and he’d been on his knees for it a decade before he ever was for Sirius.

He wanted to pray but was not sure to whom to call or what to say to them or if they would listen and finally amidst the beating of the pony’s hooves and her ragged breathing and the breeze whipping in his hair he thought God, let Harry have lived. Let James and Lily and Harry have lived. Before he could whisk the notion away he thought, God, let Remus have lived. He amended it, horrified – God, let Remus have lived so I can kill him myself.

He thought it over and over as a mantra as he rode and he was so intent on it he hardly heard the hoofbeats offset with his own until it was nearly too late and he sent himself and his pony careening into a coulee, where he dismounted, feeling jolted back from disparate pieces at the shock of his feet upon the ground. His mouth and eyes were full of dust and he and the pony were breathing hard and with their six combined knees trembling and the red mask of anger was still dropped heavily over his vision but still he managed to peek out and see the riders not fifty yards from the coulee in which he hid – two of them, trotting at a relaxed pace atop their bloody black mounts. Hooves bloody, Sirius noticed, with a violent, frigid tremor down his spine, from having crushed beneath them human bodies. The horses tossed their heads in the smell of blood and the fading energy of their own battle rush and Sirius saw amidst their tangled whipping manes the two men who rode atop them and that one was Tom Riddle with his face shaded beneath his black hat and that the other was Peter. He covered his mouth to muffle his gasp of shock. Peter’s eyes were wide and swimming in his red face but they bore no fear, only a frightening exhilaration, like a child having gotten away with a prank. Riddle’s nose was cut the way Macnair’s had been, his eyes were slits against the sun and his skin very white; he grasped his reins with fine leather gloves. He wore a festive marigold in the band of his hat and about his neck a chain of thumbs strung on a strand of grist; most were blackened with age and sun, three were fresh. The smell of blood rolled off from the riders like petrichor and Sirius thought of Remus holding Greyback’s head by the hair of it and then he thought of Remus and his heart dropped clean out.

He raised his gun; three bullets in the chamber. Holy Christ Jesus, three bullets to his goddamn name.

Sirius propped the barrel across his opposite arm and squinted down the sight of it. Peter rode closest to him and the black blur of his clothing passed above the bead at the end of the barrel. As steady as he could Sirius breathed in, out, thinking of his father teaching him to shoot when he was young. They would hunt quail out the back of their property in Comstock. He would squeeze the trigger and the cattle would start, then go back to grazing, and the sound would echo around into the base of the sky.

His father’s cold hands against his back straightening his posture and then many years later Remus who touched the bullethole scar on his shoulder with his own cold hands and then his mouth.

He did not realize he had fired until beside him his pony started and he heard Peter scream and his and Riddle’s mounts booked it, hooves hammering. When Sirius looked over at his own pony she eyed him whitely; she was nearly wasted. He talked to her as sweet as he could and mounted up and she protested when he spurred her but still she ran, likely feeling the same thread of desperation. The sun was dragging down into the West pulling the color up with it into the world and Sirius followed Peter and Riddle’s tracks Southerly through the buttes and slots by the blood printing in the dust about like spilt ink. Only spatters of it, and a vivid red, so he’d hit Peter someplace not quite so vital. He didn’t have time to curse his aim.

Never before had he ridden so deep into these hills and he hardly took note of the way the passages tightened, rising into steep, sharp red canyons. The walls were blackened here and there with patina like the marks of fires and they were carven with the glyphs of the ancients and had Sirius looked he would have seen artifacts of their settlements – weapons, potsherds. The dust was thin and red, soft, slipping beneath his pony’s feet, and the tracks of snakes were in it like a message, and when the wind came through he had to close his eyes against the needles of it and the pony tossed her head and screamed in pain. Occasionally he would ride into a wide wash and the trail would spread out, visibility lengthening across the plain, and Sirius would catch glimpse of shadows shifting over the ground ahead, then the canyons would tighten again and he would rely on footprints and blood and guesswork. He could not push the pony harder but they could not push theirs either. Nor could he push his mind harder in search of alternative to a chase – it was preoccupied dearly with bloody visions. Remus dead, the baby dead, James and Lily dead, Dumbledore and even fucking Snape dead, all dead, gutted, beheaded, dead – innocent and dead – with their thumbs cut, skin desecrated, burning and burning in their lonely pyre set by those for whom life was fodder for the buying and selling, for whom death itself was God…

When the sunset had begun to blaze in full bloody splendor in the strip of sky at the rim of the canyon Sirius thought he had nearly caught the riders before him; he watched a horse’s fanning black tail shift out of view into a slot just ahead and Westerly. It was then that a single shot rang from somewhere amidst the exposed stone. Sirius didn’t even hear it until it was echoing amidst the feet of the butte and his pony was heaving its final breaths out on top of him as the hot blood spilled from its flank over his legs, and part of the sound in the echo was his own wild scream of pain. He extracted himself from the carcass with all the strength in the leg that would still work, nearly blinded by the hurt of it, and he drew his gun, checked the chamber, even as his head spun. Two bullets. Something pale was shoving on up through his jeans having torn the fabric and spread blackness about – his bone, he realized, pain dulling shock. He drug his eyes from it and looked up and cast about for a hint of blue gunsmoke or Peter or Riddle emerging from wherever they’d hidden but advancing on him from a coulee in the red stone with his weapon held evenly was none other than Remus, hardly recognizable for all he was covered head to toe in blood. In the crook of the arm whose hand held the gun he was supporting against his shoulder the weight of the baby whose screams added to the cacophony of Sirius’s own heartbeat in his ears. Remus had been shot in the left arm direct in the muscle and the wound was deep enough it had soaked through his makeshift bandage. Likely the bullet had butted up and shattered against the bone for he held the whole limb loosely as though it did not belong to him which likely it wouldn’t for much longer. Sirius looked down over him with rapidly escalating horror and saw his hand was bound as well and the fabric had not staunched the vivid bloodflow.

“How long,” Remus shouted, hoarse with venom, over the wailing of the baby. “God fucking damn it Sirius how goddamn long?”

It had taken him some time to realize through the fog of pain what the whole thing must look like from Remus’s removed perspective. “Remus you gotta – it ain’t me. I swear to God it ain’t me –”

“Who the hell else could it fuckin be?” He had propped one boot up on the flank of Sirius’s dead horse and the hand that held the gun was very steady. His hat was gone and his hair matted with sweat and blood was drying across his skin in varying shades and beneath it his face was very white with the shock and the bloodloss. “Do you remember we found those bodies by the Rio Grande? Weren’t Indians I can tell you now. Myself of all people should’ve suspected white men just as capable if not more so of fuckin savagery. Do you know why they call themselves Death Eaters? When they do a thing like this they wear trophies – women’s things, armor. They wear dried out hearts like you do, Sirius. And ears, and hands, and dicks. Any goddamn appendage you can bet they’re fuckin wearin it and you can bet they’ll be fuckin wearin all our friends. All my friends I should fuckin say. They knew where we’d camped out, cause someone set us up, and it ain’t me, and so I wonder, who the hell else could it fuckin be.”

So indeed they were all dead. He hardly even felt the blow of it inside the pain. “Remus – ”

“Never say my name again.” There was one bullet left in Remus’s secondhand filigreed gun. The burning sky glinted like a ruby through each empty chamber. 

“I saw Peter ride out,” Sirius said, fighting desperately with the words, sucking back deeper into the eternity of pain. Leg in splinters and the desert sucking the consciousness out of him by fragments. His vision swam. “Hard to the West. And right beside him Tom Riddle in the goddamn flesh.”

“I know you’re full of shit Sirius on account of I know he’s dead.”

“You didn’t hear em ride right past this place? I swear to God. You gotta let me go on after em.”

“No.”

Remus wouldn’t shoot him, he was sure of it. Even if he believed so much he could summon the will for it he wouldn’t waste the single bullet. “I was sure it was you,” Sirius said, trying to stand. It was as though he had flipped an hourglass; everything was blurring out in black and red. Remus froze, eyes huge, the whites of them red with blood and the blowing sand. He knew it was cruel but he couldn’t help it, the pain stripped the filter away. “Thought it was you and you’d gone back to that stuff and I didn’t say nothin.”

“Fuck you,” Remus hissed. “Did you think I would’ve killed you for it?”

“Well what did you fuckin think I would’ve killed you for?”

“Your evil mother,” Remus said. “Clearly weren’t enough that I fuckin loved you.” His finger was white-knuckle tight against the trigger. “I knew you’d do anythin for anyone to want you around but I didn’t expect you’d fuckin do a thing like this. Which is just wishful denial as I now fuckin know.”

“You think I got no fuckin loyalty to a single soul – ”

“I know you don’t,” Remus said. “You don’t know the meanin of the fuckin word.”

He would have been more articulate if he could summon his mind back out of hell. “You think I could – I was by your side through all that – and why would I, if I didn’t – ”

“I don’t know,” Remus said, “and it don’t fuckin matter on account of I’m sorely fuckin tempted now.”

“ – if I didn’t love you,” Sirius finished, because he had been afraid, and the words had been stuck. They always had been. They were hardly coming unstuck even now but he wished they would. It was the pressure of them inside his heart that hurt so but they would not come.

One single liquid tear traced with the blood cutting the dust and grime on Remus’s face and he smudged it away in a vivid riot of reds. “I don’t fuckin lie to you,” he said, again, still bitterly, “so you shouldn’t fuckin lie to me. I think on account of everything you owe me that fuckin courtesy if none other.”

“You owe it to me to fuckin consider that I wouldn’t set it up to kill you and all our friends.” They were both quiet in the wake of that and in the silence the wind tore through the wide slot with a sound like the distant ocean. Remus’s eyes were wet but he would not let fall another tear. Perhaps it was only on account of the pain. “I would’ve done anythin for you. Since I was fifteen,” Sirius told him. He never would have said it had he been in his right fucking mind. “Anythin. I swear. Trust me – ”

It hung in the air, like an evil spell – trust me –

“Leave if you’re gonna,” Remus said, like a knife, cutting silence. The weeping was in his voice with the bitterness of the pain and the venom and a scream unvocalized. Behind him the desert lit afire in red gradient with the sinking sun like an ember in the horn of it and Sirius assembled a thousand words in his mouth that would not go. But if they had gone Remus would hardly have been able to read them anyway. The baby was quiet against his shoulder, eyes shut, having wailed himself to sleep or near it, looking so like James that Sirius could feel at last the shock and the horror boiling up inside himself like a shield of lava. The grey in Remus’s eyes was bright with pain and pale as haze and for once Sirius felt he could see through it into the wild heart and he wanted to crawl in there and sleep forever. No one else would know the hurt of this but he saw now that every drop of love the desert had left to Remus had been palisaded against him.

He could walk only by leaps dragging the broken leg behind him because he would not crawl. He moved past Remus like some monster loosed from laboratory and he could feel against his back Remus’s eyes and the barrel of his gun even when he had crossed the wide wash and limped into the slot Westerly, where Riddle and Peter had gone. He held himself standing with his hand running against the smooth stone bloody red inside the burning of the sunset like the interior still of some final womb from which he would be born something entirely unlike this self with no mother and alone entire upon this earth unto the desert who would cast eye upon him and demand his covenant closed. He would have been remade with skin thick enough to keep walking in spite of it until there was no country. He would see them coming to collect the toll from miles about and like the outlaws of old on the royal roads traversing this continent before it was nations he would walk alone into the wilds and watch them pass.

And until they caught up he would not stop following. And when he died he would still be following. And he would follow until the desert ate him whole, his memory entire, until he was erased from this very earth, until nothing living in it remembered his name, or his face – that he had ever been pressed together out of salt and blood, that he had ever drawn a breath at all, that he had ever loved.  

He would avenge himself and the days – hours – minutes – he had been other than lonely, other than himself, other than one.

When the darkness had spread in full across the world the slot opened into the hills and Sirius held up to collect his breath at the mouth of it. All that was visible inside the liquid night was the continued burning of the hotel like another demon star beneath the firmament signaling the piling of corpses upon the pyre.

He faced the Western trail again.

 --

EPILOGUE 

Seattle, Washington Territory  
December 1861

 

Uphill from the sound in the still milky night a young man was pacing in the street holding a bundle close to his chest. The fog and the sleeting needle rain had come in thick near the edge of the settlement where the streets dissolved into forest and there the thick tangled trees and moss threw shadow off that stirred in the mist. The silence was still and complete except distantly audible in it the dull ringing of the bells in the harbor and the sound of the pacing of the kid in the street whose disintegrating boots displaced gravel. After a while it seemed he had made his mind up and he climbed the steps to the threshold of a darkened house, white paint peeling, porch swing cobwebbed, smoke spiraling from the chimney into the night and the low clouds. The garden was overgrown and wild in the temperate rain of that city with blackberry brambles and dead stalks of lavender and a thick, oily-leaved rhododendron, drooping under its own weight. The kid pounded thrice upon the door with his elbow and after a moment a lantern lit inside and flared behind the drawn curtains and illuminated the shadow of the kid’s gaunt face, scar across the bridge of the nose like a white chalk line, left shirtsleeve folded neatly and pinned against the shoulder with a woman’s silver brooch. The bundle he held was a dark-skinned baby wrapped in wool blankets, already with a head of wild dark hair, sleeping soundly. “I’m sorry,” the kid said to the baby, his voice hardly sound, just a wind sound, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry –”

The locks slid and the door opened and the soft lanternlight spilled out into the street and the kid took one very tentative step onto the threshold.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [this now has a sequel](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10859826). 
> 
> [THIS](http://8tracks.com/vittorioe/d-e-s-p-e-r-a-d-o) is what i listened to while writing this story.  
>  for your viewing pleasure: fanart from the very talented [27noir](http://archiveofourown.org/users/27noir) \- [HERE](http://allhailthedeadvole.tumblr.com/post/125820343718/took-a-break-from-writing-fanfic-to-draw-fanart), and by [munichmannequins](http://munichmannequins.tumblr.com/) [HERE](http://yeats-infection.tumblr.com/post/157963251230/munichmannequins-sirius-inspired-by)  
> (i am honored by fanart, please tag me on tumblr if you make some and i'll weep over it / link it here, i'm [yeats-infection](http://yeats-infection.tumblr.com/))  
> thank you for reading.  
> 


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